You Need to Learn This New Claude Function...

So this week, 3 AI companies dropped desktop apps. One's free, one's for developers, and one has agents running while you sleep. And in this video, we're going to cover which one you should use. And at this point in the video, I would usually say, welcome to this week's episode of AI News You Can Use, the show that pulls together all the AI releases and I filter the ones that matter. And then we would get into the first story, but I'm making a change. We'll get into the first story shortly here, but this was my docket for today. This was the plan covering all of these 14 stories in total, 7 long segments, 7 quick hits. Let me tell you, about half of these don't excite me. I don't think this is something that you'll be using. Some of them are just a novelty, but we should talk about it because some people might use it. Like the OpenAI cybersecurity model. I guess you could use it, but— Mm. There's Gemini in Chrome skills that are not even available, and it's just prompt presets in a browser. And a few more. So, you know, I really had a hard time prepping for this. I just felt demotivated because I'm not genuinely interested in some of these stories. And then not just that, that comes across through the camera, but also you probably won't care as much. I want to show you the stuff that makes a difference. But with this News You Can Use format, I feel like I have the responsibility to cover all the news that you can use, which is a lot of pressure and quite the rigid format. So I'm shaking it up because at the end of the day, we get to spend time together at least once a week. And this is not CNN. My job is not to cover every single thing out there. Go check out the blogs, go check out every newsletter ever if you want that. We even have an AI Advantage newsletter where we cover a wider gamut. That That covers it well. But in this video, I really want to focus on the things that have a chance at making a difference in your life, or at least the ones that make me go, wow. So instead of trying to be a TV channel, CNN, I'll just focus on what I care about. And I hope that translates to you. So sorry for rambling on a bit there. But the show has been going on forever. And this is a big change, but I feel super good about it. So let's begin. First up, I just want to briefly show you the Gemini app that is now available on Mac. And look, they're just following suit. This is nothing revolutionary. You can go ahead and download this if you have a Mac. But this is not just relevant for people who are using Gemini. It's also relevant for people who are using NotebookLM. Because as soon as you install it like so, well then you have an app like this. And as you can see here from the dropdown, you can also access your notebooks within NotebookLM. In this account, I don't have any, but that's kind of neat. As some of the other apps, you can access the app anywhere just by pressing Option+Space. That's also nice. From all the things you can do in here, the one that excited me in the beginning was like, oh, you can share a window. But honestly, over time, I don't use this much myself. I kind of just copy paste. Or add screenshots. There's a bunch more tools in here. If you're a Gemini or a NotebookLM user, you might want to use this. Also, it's available for free on a Mac. But really, they're just playing catch-up. And when we look to some of the competition that is really moving ahead, well, that's when the conversation shifts to the new Claude desktop app. And oh boy, did they add some stuff into here. So if you update your app, you'll find that they redesigned the top bar. Before, you could switch between chat, co-work, and Claude code. Here in the middle. Now it's here on the left. And if I tab over all the way to Cloud Code, there's a few major changes they made to this. And now it's really starting to match the capabilities of what you previously could only get in a terminal. One of the amazing things with a terminal before this was that you could have multiple windows, open Cloud Code in each one of these, and work on multiple projects simultaneously like this. Well, with the updated desktop app, you can start one project in here, you start a new session here, Here you start another one, and then you could simply grab it and drag it out. Look at that, you could split view these two apps being built at the same time. Heck, you could go further than that. There's three at the same time. This is new. Now additionally, you could also view the terminal from in here, which is also new. Look at that. And of course, there's all this added convenience of having a desktop app versus a terminal. If I wanted to, I could use the voice dictation that works, you know, okay, Claude voice dictation is not the best, but hey, there you go. I could use all the slash commands with a better interface, arguably, than what you get in the terminal. And all the other features that are really conveniently accessible right here. But yes, you do need a paid plan to access Claude Code. That hasn't changed. Now, okay, that's a nice quality of life upgrade if you're already a Claude Code user. But here is the one thing that might actually make some people switch over because that's an upgrade for existing users. But they added something big and it's called routines. These are basically scheduled tasks. But here's the kicker. We've scheduled tasks in other places. Some of them are absolutely horrendous, like the ChatGPT ones. At this point, I wouldn't even touch those. Others are really good, like the Cloud Cowork scheduled tasks. Fantastic stuff. But the downside of scheduled tasks usually is, well, the machine that runs the software that schedules the tasks and then runs it on a schedule every day at 9 AM, let's say, it needs to be open. If I run it on this MacBook, I need to leave the MacBook right here plugged into power. I can't take it with me. I can't close it. Well, now with routines, check this out. If I go to routines and I say new routine, I get two options. One of them is local, as I said, running on this laptop, or I can just say remote and all of a sudden this will run in the cloud. If I set this up, I could do a meeting summarizer and I'll improve the prompt here in a second, but I could just write the prompt in here. I could turn on Opus 4.7, which by the way is actually really amazing. It's the new flagship model from Claude. I created a separate video on it. There's a few unique things about it. For example, you can upload images 3 times the size, process them. Again, separate video on the channel. It's actually worth watching. And then as I set my model and pick my schedule, let's say, yeah, every day 9 AM, that sounds good. Well, now I could add several connectors here at the bottom. So I don't need these. But for example, I could add Zoom for Claude. And then I'll talk about that one in a second. But when I hit create, this will run every day at 9 AM. And it will work with the Zoom connector, pulling the transcripts, summarize them, and it'll appear in my account in my app without the laptop being active. That's pretty amazing. But now for the sake of this demo, let's actually finish this routine that will run in the cloud. So one of the pieces that you'll need is you'll need that connectors. So when I go here to customize and connectors, and then you hit plus and you say browse connectors, and you can say Zoom. And here, if you add Zoom for Claude, you'll have to connect this. Now the first time you connect, you'll just have to give it your login information. And then there's a menu of different options. I just gave it access to search meetings and get the recording resources, including the transcripts. And then once you connect it, you can give it access to all of these read-only tools over here. Just said Always allow. And now you can use this within Claude Code or Claude Cowork or just within Claude. Even if you're just using Claude, as long as the connector is enabled here, you could say get my meeting transcripts from Zoom. Now for me right now, this is probably not going to work because I'm not the host of my meetings. You need to be the host to have access to the meeting transcripts in Zoom. But I think you're starting to get the point here. If I run a little prompt like help me improve this prompt, summarize my meetings from the past 24 hours, and then I specify the goal right here, it will give me an improved prompt, which I'll briefly copy. Go back to my routine, go back to the meeting summarizer, hit edit. And here, let's put in this prompt. I better double check this, make sure I actually agree with what's written here. But that's kind of it. This is how it would look to set up our remote meeting summarizer running on— well, realistically, you could be on a $20 plan and it could run in the cloud every day. And then here you can just keep stacking routines and you don't even need a machine. You don't need a Mac Mini. This is getting pretty amazing. So I really wanted to show you this. I think this is going to make a big difference for many people. Look, if I switch to the calendar view, it's just going to be running every day and you can start stacking multiple tasks here. But the thing is, you don't just arrive at a point where you're thinking in this systematic way, where you're thinking about automating tasks. That does take a mindset shift. And obviously, there's also a skill component here. And it's a lot. It's overwhelming. People are like, oh my God, AI is a moving target. There's so much going on, new stuff coming out every day. The stuff that I learn changes every week and it's real. We're living through a technological revolution and there is a lot of it. But look, at the end of the day, if you simplify it down, if you just think about what can I do to save time with this technology, it dumbs it down and in the best type of way, because all of a sudden you can start focusing on getting your time back and then you can use that time for whatever you want. Now, exactly that is the core philosophy of The Advantage. As you know, end of last year, I partnered with Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and we run events and trainings where we teach people how to get to this level where you're architecting systems that run without your presence. But again, you don't get there overnight. You need a map. And it's not a map that takes like a minute or two to read. It actually takes a little bit of time, but it's a map worth getting. And it's one that can be followed for non-technical users. So if you too want to figure out what this map looks like, then we're putting on a live event next week. It's completely free, April 23rd through 25th. It's 3 days, 3 hours a day. I speak multiple times there, and we're going to lay it out for you. We're going to show you what this progression looks like. And then you can follow that on your own or together with us. Again, the thing is completely free. I would love for you to join us. I wanted to add one disclaimer though. If you have multiple thousand hours and you're super confident in Claude code or building Claude bots, then this event isn't going to be showing you how to build multiple workflows. We're really zooming out and focusing on the big picture. All of it through this lens of saving time with AI so that you can get some much needed clarity. So if that sounds interesting to you, then come join us. I would love to have you there and also bring a loved one. Honestly, this is like a perfect event to share with friends or family. That might not be keeping up with AI at all. All right, it's coming up next week. I hope to see you there. The link is in the description below. Now here's a few more things that popped up on my radar this week. I used to call them quick hits, but honestly, radar is more appropriate. And the third one is another app, but honestly, this one purely feels like catch-up to me. It's OpenAI's Codex adding some features. You can now directly edit items in the browser. It can remote control your browser. They added 90 new plugins, but Honestly, this is probably a thing for people that are already using Codex, just got better. It's not a reason to switch over the way I see it. Really, it's just competing with Claude Code and trying to become an open Claude. If that's not for you though, I have something that actually wowed me this week. I looked at this with no expectation whatsoever. I opened it up, I was like, okay, Gemini 3.1 Flash, text-to-speech, another model that turns words into audio. All right, I've seen hundreds of these. There's another one. Oh, it's— Topping the leaderboard. All right, better than ElevenLabs. Not bad, but it's marginal, right? And then I went to this video. Enough talk. Listen.

Welcome to the next generation of Gemini text-to-speech. Watch how these tags transform the tone. We can drop into a dark, suspenseful whisper or speed things up to absolute panic mode because we're running out of time.

Oh my God, isn't that exciting? Jesus, the way it projects that voice is, I don't know, beyond anything I have heard. And you could try it out. It's really fun. Look, you just go to aistudio.google.com/generatespeech. Link is in the description below as per usual. And in here, if you put something in square brackets, it all of a sudden adds these emotions. So this one is a quite old library on a rainy night.

It's windows dark, save for a single candle flickering on the third floor.

And by the way, I don't even have an API key linked here. So this is just running for free. You can try it too. So yeah, you could play around with that here. And it's also available for the API. So you could build it into apps. And it's also available in Google Vids that we looked at last week. Like a really simple video editing software with all of these AI tools. It's in the browser. You could use it in there too. Google is building good products here, honestly. And talk about good products from Google. I have one more, and it's an application available on the Mac App Store that gives you fully offline and free dictation. That's it. As simple as that. It competes with the likes of Whisperflow. And while I can't download it because I'm not on the US App Store where this is available, from what I've seen across the internet, some people complain that if there's too much echo, it doesn't work perfectly. But mostly it should be pretty reliable. And again, it's completely free, whereas some of the competing apps charge you $15 a month to do the same thing here. Now the quality won't be quite there. And also apps like Whisperflow, which I personally use too, are nice because you can use them on your MacBook, on your desktop, on your phone. And that's nice. But this is running on the Gamma 4 model, which is so small that it can actually run on your phone and do this transcription at no cost whatsoever. Amazing AI use case. I'm looking forward to this actually being available on more platforms and app stores and regions, more of everything. But yeah, this is what local AI is eventually going to look like. It's going to be packaged in apps from the big tech companies and it's just going to be really fluent to use it. And that's it. Those are the stories that I really cared about this week. Some of the stuff that popped up on my radar, all shared back to you. I'm going to keep doing this weekly, but I'll be more selective and some of the videos might be shorter. Hey, if there's only one or two things to cover, I'll cover only one or two things. I won't feel obliged to go for every little release and to stretch out the video. After all, we're all here to figure it out together and not just to learn about every single little thing. That's just overwhelming. So I hope to see you at the summit next week. It's going to be incredible, honestly. So many great speakers. And I have a lot to share there too. And with that being said, I hope you have a wonderful day.