There is a cloud One of the AI platforms At the forefront of the generative AI revolution: It’s become the go-to AI of choice for many coders, and it’s pushing Agentic AI that can take actions for usersAlso. It’s also really easy to use, and even opens with a warm and familiar greeting (“back at it” when I last loaded it). However you use the cloud, there are also a number of features and tools worth knowing about that can help you delve deeper into AI’s capabilities. Whether it’s letting the cloud rummage through your email, adjusting the style in which the cloud responds, or putting the cloud to work in your web browser, there’s plenty to explore outside of the core prompt box.
Connect the cloud to Gmail to help manage your inbox
Connectors enable the cloud to connect to other apps, and there are many, including Spotify, Canva, Tripadvisor and Uber. You can add a new connector by clicking on the cloud + (Plus) button in the lower left corner of the prompt box, then select Connectors > Add Connector.
The Gmail connector is particularly useful. If you allow the cloud to access your inbox, AI can perform tasks like summarizing your daily messages or identifying emails that need a response. Are you asking “Which email senders in my Gmail account can I leave unread the most?” For example, or “Find emails in the last 30 days in Gmail that look like they need a response.”
Use the cloud to create interactive visualizations to accelerate learning
The cloud shows how sound waves work.
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Cloud ChatGPT and Gemini can’t generate AI images the way they can, but it is capable of creating diagrams, charts and visualizations and making them interactive. One of the best ways to use this is when you’re learning about something: you can get the cloud to create an interactive diagram of a volcano, for example, or a timeline of 1990s music you can scroll through.
A prompt like “Make me an interactive visualization explaining how sound waves work” will show what the cloud can do. You’ll get a simple animation in return that shows how sound waves work, and sliders to adjust the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves so you can see the differences they make.
Prepare your signals to ensure that the cloud checks its sources
The cloud usually does a good job of pulling and synthesizing information from the web—you can check it by clicking on it and searching online. + button in the prompt box, then “Web Search”—but it doesn’t always have a full idea of the sources it’s looking at.
A little prompt hacking can help here. If you’re searching the web, specify that the cloud should focus primarily on the most up-to-date information from the most reputable website publishers (you can specify this if you’d like). Adding a note to avoid rumor and speculation is also a good idea and should mean that Cloud’s responses are more reliable. The cloud will embed web links in its answers for reference, so you can check if it did what it was told.
Specify styles to customize the cloud’s responses
Select the style of your choice.
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Click + button in the corner of the prompt box, then select Use styleAnd you’ll notice that there are many different styles you can get to respond to the cloud: to learn, Brief, ExplanatoryAnd Formal. It is also Create and edit styles Option to add your own. You may want to create a style where Cloud responds with short, sharp, and to-the-point answers, or a style where Cloud uses very simple language to explain complex topics. If you want you can also set a style where Cloud talks like a pirate.
Use the cloud’s “skills” to help complete specific jobs
Skill is another feature of the cloud that can make a significant difference in how much you get out of AI. It’s essentially a set of instructions that you can call when needed – saving you from having to type the instructions each time.
For example, you can use the skill to guide the tone and complexity of language used when writing responses, or add instructions for how meeting notes should be reformatted and summarized—with specific headings or section lengths. Custom dictionaries are another useful skill, where the cloud can save definitions and bring them back when needed.
The skills may be very advanced and may involve coding, but it’s the easiest way to get started + button in the prompt box, then select Skill > Add Skill. You’ll find that there’s actually a skill creator that you can use, which lets you create skills through natural language prompts.
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Stop the cloud from training on your conversations
You can opt out of your chats being used as training data.
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It’s not about making a cloud do something, but about it stop It, instead—specifically, blocks the cloud from using your prompts to train its AI models. Click on your user account name (bottom left), then select Settings > Privacyand disable the labeled feature Help improve the cloud. That way, you’ll know that your conversations are being used only for your own purposes—not to help Anthropic improve its models.
Create cloud chat links to make the experience a little more collaborative
Look in the top right corner of any chat, and you’ll see a Share it Click this button, and you can create a public link to the chat that you can send to others or even post on the web. It’s a read-only share though, so it’s more for disseminating information than collaborating on ideas. Anything you add to a conversation after sharing won’t appear on the shared link, although it will if you unshare the chat and then share it again. As such, resharing links can make the experience a bit more collaborative: If others have input, you can ask the cloud, allow it to respond, then reshare the chat link. To manage the chats you’ve shared with the wider world, then click on your account name (bottom left). Settings > Privacy And Arrange next to the Shared chats.
Use the cloud to create an Excel file to help you with monthly budgeting
The cloud can create entire files within minutes.
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Cloud is capable of creating Word and Excel files from a single prompt, so you can get it to create a chart showing the state of the semiconductor industry or the accomplishments of your favorite sports team in just a few minutes. You can use this feature to create templates that you can fill in as needed. For example, tell the cloud to “create an Excel file for family financial planning, with space to enter basic incomings and outgoings” and you get a fully formatted spreadsheet that you can update.
Use Cloud’s browser extension to find the best hotel for the trip
Cloud has a browser extension that you can install in Chrome or any Chromium-based browser (such as Microsoft Edge). Then you can give it tasks like navigating websites, filling forms, extracting data etc. The add-on will ask for approval for key actions, such as making a purchase, and you can get it to ask for approval for each action by selecting Ask before acting In the prompt box that pops up when you launch the extension.
A cloud extension can do a lot. One helpful function the bot can do is look at hotel listings on a website and decide which one is best for you based on the criteria you provide (price, what the AI already knows about you, and any other information you want to add).
Switch to incognito mode to chat privately with the cloud
Go incognito and the cloud will forget who you are.
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Sometimes you may not want your chats with the cloud to be on record, to remove any trace of them and prevent the cloud from referring to them in the future. When you start a new chat, click the little ghost icon in the top right corner to go incognito. To go back to normal, click X upper right corner. Your incognito chats are not used for training, But retained by Anthropic for 30 days before being deleted.
