Claude, meet Clippy. If you have Microsoft Word, now you can use Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude within the software as an alternative The pilotthe company announced in a LinkedIn post.
The add-on is now available to Claude customers with Team or Enterprise plans, and you’re free to try it out. The feature is currently in beta testing, and Anthropic has not indicated when a wider release will take place.
Companies use the beta period to test new products with a small set of people to find bugs, measure usability and get feedback. Then, they can adjust and refine the product before a wider release.
Anthropic continues to make Claude different software tools at work. Launched in June 2024, the AI assistant is available in Google Workspace applications such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Claude can also be integrated into Slack, a communication and collaboration platform.
Last week, Anthropic announced that its An AI agent a tool Claude Cowork is now available in paid versions for both macOS and Windows.
For many Word users, Claude could be a welcome alternative to Copilot, the AI assistant introduced by Microsoft in February 2023. Copilot is reportedly losing ground to competitors, and the ubiquity of Windows 11 and many other Microsoft systems has become a pain point for some customers.
Copilot isn’t the first Microsoft Word assistant to upset people. People of a certain age will remember Clippy, a digital assistant built into Word in 1996. Although now considered silly and shady, Clippy annoyed Word users at the time by coming up with suggestions that were often useless, and difficult to close.
Clippy was not enabled by default on April 11, 2001, but is now available as a Chrome extension — it appears whenever you visit a web page (only visually, as it doesn’t provide any help).
In its announcement this week, Anthropic said Claude, as a copilot, can perform a variety of tasks. You can create new content and help edit existing documents. To create documents, “you can open your template and define what you need.” To edit existing documents, “you can highlight a paragraph and tell Claude to tighten it, remove the accent or cut the artificial accent,” and it can identify broken references.
Anthropic also highlighted Claude’s ability to work with comments that others might add to the text. The company said Claude can read and analyze comments, and then respond as instructed.
In an excerpt from the announcement, Claude was asked to “summarize what the changed partner’s advice is” in a nondisclosure agreement. Claude then listed several changes that were made to the NDA, including two that would have been “deals.” The customer instructed Claude to reverse those changes and return the new contract language to someone else.
There were many comments on Anthropic’s LinkedIn post about the Claude add-in for Word. One person complained that “sometimes Claude decides to produce an MS Office document himself,” while another commented, “I like to see it and have been waiting for this release.”
