Use Claude Duet to proactively handle your everyday tasks

Claude Duet (research preview) is a proactive agent you message the way you’d message a trusted coworker. You can give it anything from a quick request, to a bigger task, to ongoing work it keeps moving while you’re away.

How Claude Duet is different from Claude

Claude Duet and the Claude app are two separate apps, and it’s the same Claude in both. Claude Duet runs on your Claude account, so it has access to the memory, skills, and connectors you’ve already set up in Claude.

You work with Claude Duet differently in a few ways:

• It comes to you: The Claude app waits for you to open a chat, and you work on something alongside Claude. Claude Duet comes to you. Each morning, it sends you a short brief on the most important items in your email and calendar. Throughout the day, it keeps tabs on your connected apps and messages you when something needs your attention.
• You message it like you would a person: You can message it through typing or voice in one ongoing thread, so a quick reply and a weeklong project both start in the same place like how you communicate with coworkers.
• Work continues when you step away: It works on its own computer in the cloud, so it can keep working after you close the app. You’ll receive a notification when the task is complete or needs your review.
• Important decisions stay with you: Claude Duet reads, drafts, and prepares work on its own. It is designed to ask for your approval before it sends a message on your behalf, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything.

Put its proactivity to work

A proactive agent doesn’t have to wait to be asked to do something. It can keep an eye on your work while you’re away, which enables more ambitious or long-running asks. For instance, consider giving it the whole responsibility where you would have given it a single task.

Claude Duet works from the context in your Claude account and the apps and tools you set up.

1. Set up Claude Duet

If you don’t have access yet, join the waitlist. Once your account has access:

1. Get the app: Claude Duet is a standalone app for iOS and Android. When it’s your turn, open the invitation email on your phone and follow the setup steps for iPhone or Android. Sign in with the Claude account you already use. On a computer, you can open it on the web at claude.ai.

2. Connect your tools: Claude Duet can use the apps you’ve already connected in Claude. Start with your email and calendar. Then add the apps where your work is, such as Google Drive, HubSpot, QuickBooks or Docusign. You can manage access in your Claude settings. It can do more for you once it knows your work, so start by connecting the tools it doesn’t have yet.

3. Turn on notifications: They let Claude Duet reach you when something is ready or needs you.

4. Check what Claude Duet knows: Your context is the foundation Claude Duet works from. Once your tools are connected, check that Claude Duet can access the right information and is aligned with your priorities. Ask:

   • “What do you know about me and my work?”
   • “Based on my last few weeks of work, what do you think my priorities are?”

   Correct what’s wrong, or fill in gaps that might help Claude Duet going forward.

   As you work, continue adding your judgment about the work or its proactivity. Claude Duet can save notes about your preferences, so over time it becomes more tuned to you. Along with your preferences, include context or your rationale, so that going forward Claude Duet can judge future cases. For example:

   • “This could have waited until the morning brief. Vendor updates only matter to me when a date or a price changes.”

2. Get something off your plate

Message it like you would a person. Type a message or record a voice message. Ask it for whatever is top of mind, like doing the research for a decision you need to make, or scheduling a meeting. You can have it draft replies while you’re on the go, or remind you of what’s on your to-do list with the first step already done.

If you’re not sure where to begin, try one of these:

• Start with one small task: Pick something that is already on your list today. A small task lets you see how Claude Duet works in your apps before you give it more.
  • “Clear out anything in my inbox that I don’t need to read.”
  • “Track replies to the invite I sent Tuesday, and add attendees to the event tracker doc.”
• Give it your whole to-do list: Type it or say it aloud, in any order, in one message. Claude Duet can answer the quick questions right away and turn the rest into tasks.
• Ask what it could take on: Claude Duet suggests tasks from your own email and calendar, and you choose which to keep.
  • “What could you take on for me this week?”

3. Hand it bigger jobs

You can start a larger task the same way, with a message. Describe what you need, and Claude Duet works out which apps to use and how much effort the job takes. Bigger results come back as files you can review and edit, such as a research brief, a financial model, a slide deck, or a dashboard.

Try it on a task where you would otherwise open several apps and put the answer together yourself:

• “Find everything I’ve promised people by email and haven’t done. Start the first step of each one, and draft the quick replies for me to approve.”
• “Build me one page I can check every morning. Is the business healthy, and where should I look?”
• “Each evening, look at tomorrow’s calendar. For every meeting with someone outside my company, send me a one-page brief from our emails and shared docs.”

If you have something specific in mind, add a line to your message. You can:

• Tell Claude Duet where to look and which apps to use:
  • “Use last month’s report in my Drive as the template.”
• Say what kind of result you want back:
  • “Turn what you find into a one-page summary I can forward to my team.”
• Put recurring tasks or work on a schedule:
  • “Do this every Friday afternoon.”

Good to know: Larger tasks, like building a financial model or a deck, require more model turns and background work. They use more of your plan’s limits than a quick request does.

4. How you will hear back

Claude Duet messages you in your main thread. With notifications on, you also see the message on your phone. It sends a few kinds of messages:

• A morning brief: Each morning, it looks across your email and calendar, picks what most needs your attention, and can start the first steps, like drafting replies for you to review.
• Updates on your tasks: Through the day, it sends updates on the work it’s doing and follows up on threads that have gone quiet.
• Something it noticed: Between tasks, it checks your connected apps every few hours and messages you when something needs you.
• A request for your approval: Claude Duet is designed to show you what it’s about to do and await your approval before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting anything. If you can’t approve right away, Claude Duet finishes the rest of the task and brings the approval back to you later.

Good to know: It checks your accounts at set intervals, so something urgent can arrive between checks.

When a message arrives:

• Read before you approve: Review drafts and approval requests before you confirm them.
• Check where a number came from: When it gives you a number or a summary, it tells you which email, file, or spreadsheet it came from. Click in to verify.
• Say what you want more or less of: You can also tell it what you want to hear about and how often.
  • “Leave newsletters out of my updates. I only want to hear about email that needs a reply from me.”
  • “Good catch. Whenever a date changes, tell me, and also tell me what else it affects.”

5. Keeping track of your work

The phone app has tabs at the bottom of the screen, and you can add channels for separate topics.

• Chat: Your main thread stays in one place, so Claude Duet picks up where you left off.
• Tasks: The Tasks tab shows what Claude Duet is working on and highlights tasks that need your input. It may suggest that a task looks finished, but only you can mark a task as completed.
• Make: Finished work, like a research brief, a financial model, a slide deck or a dashboard, appears in the Make tab.
• Channels: You can also start separate channels for different topics, and they share the same memory. You don’t need channels to get started. Add one when a topic keeps coming up and you want to keep it apart from your main thread. Some people keep one per client or per area of the business, such as sales, staffing and events.

Research preview: known limitations

During the research preview, keep these limits in mind:

• Where it’s available: Claude Duet is available on Pro, Max, and Ultra plans in the US, through a waitlist. It isn’t available on Team or Enterprise plans yet.
• It can get things wrong: It may misread a thread or miscalibrate what’s urgent, and it can miss something that arrives between checking in with you. Read each approval before you tap it.
• It uses your plan’s limits: Work it does in the background, like the morning brief and check-ins, also counts, so you may reach your limits sooner than with chat alone. During the research preview, we add full limit resets to your account so you have room to try Claude Duet. Each one refills both your five-hour session and weekly limits when you choose to use it in Settings > Usage on the web or in Claude Desktop. Pro gets three resets, and Max and Ultra get one. Unused resets expire on December 15, 2026.
• Projects and connectors: It can’t see all of your projects yet. Some connectors, such as Slack, work with limits in Claude Duet.
• Off-limits actions: It doesn’t make phone calls or send text messages to other people. Some actions are off-limits even with your approval, such as trading securities, moving money between accounts, or accessing someone else’s account.
• It’s built around work: We built its core functionality around work, so personal errands, such as booking tickets, aren’t quite as strong.

See the help center for more. You can send feedback or report any issues directly from the chat by telling Claude Duet in plain words what happened, and it will pass your report to our team.