Anthropic’s AI Assistant Claude Is Now Available in Microsoft Word
Claude, let me introduce you to Clippy. If you have Microsoft Word, you can now use Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude in the software as an alternative to Co-pilotthe company announced in a post on LinkedIn.
The add-on is now available to Claude customers with Team or Enterprise plans, and is free to trial. The feature is currently in beta testing and Anthropic has not indicated when a wider rollout will take place.
Companies use the beta period to test new products with a smaller subset of people to discover bugs, evaluate usability, and get feedback. Then they can make fixes and refine the product before a wider release.
Anthropic continues to introduce Claude to different work software tools. Launching in June 2024, the AI assistant is available in Google Workspace programs such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Claude can also be integrated into Slack, the communication and collaboration platform.
Last week, Anthropic announced that its AI Agent tool Claude Cowork is now available on paid plans for MacOS and Windows.
For many Word users, Claude could be a welcome alternative to Copilot, an AI assistant launched by Microsoft in February 2023. Copilot is reportedly losing ground to competitors, and its ubiquity in Windows 11 and many other Microsoft software has been a sore point for some customers.
Copilot isn’t the first Microsoft Word assistant to exasperate people. People of a certain age will remember Clippy, a digital assistant integrated into Word in 1996. Although now considered nostalgic and iconic, Clippy irritated Word users at the time by displaying often useless suggestions and was difficult to turn off.
Clippy is no longer enabled by default as of April 11, 2001, but is now available as a Chrome extension, appearing whenever you visit a web page (for appearance only, as it provides no support).
In its announcement this week, Anthropic said Claude, like Copilot, could perform a variety of tasks. You can create new content and help edit existing documents. For document generation, you can “open your template and describe what you need”. To edit existing documents, you can “highlight a paragraph and tell Claude to tighten it, change the tone, or cut the passive voice,” and he can identify broken cross-references.
Anthropic also touted Claude’s ability to work with comments that others might add to a document. The company said Claude could read and analyze comments and then respond to them as instructed.
In one example from the ad, Claude was asked to “summarize what the partner’s lawyer changed” in a mutual nondisclosure agreement. Claude then listed several changes to the NDA, including two that were potential dealbreakers. The client asked Claude to postpone these changes and send the new contract clauses back to the other party.
There were many comments on Anthropic’s LinkedIn post about the Claude add-in for Word. One person complained that “sometimes Claude decides to generate an MS Office document on his own”, while another commented: “I love seeing it and have been waiting for this version.”
