How I’m Actually Using Claude Duet (After 10 Hours of Testing)

Video authored by the channel shown, not by IANIA; all rights belong to the creator. Transcript and summary generated automatically; the original-language content is preserved.

Original language: English

Original video: How I’m Actually Using Claude Duet (After 10 Hours of Testing) · Channel: Riley Brown · 24:04 · Watch on YouTube

Topics: AI agents, Claude, AI developer tools, AI content generation, Multimodal models

Summary

After about 10 hours of testing Claude Duet, Riley Brown describes its standalone iOS and web apps, channel-based organization, and tools for creating and editing artifacts. He likes its speed, voice dictation, and ability to delegate work into parallel task threads, but finds the layers of chats and tasks confusing. He also compares Duet’s real-time voice and local coding capabilities with competing agent apps, noting that Duet is still in early access and lacks some features. His main hopes for improvements are better real-time voice and the ability to start local Claude Code sessions.

Key points

Duet is a standalone iOS and web app, currently in early access.
The app uses channels to organize conversations, and the presenter finds it fast and easy to use.
Artifacts such as slide decks can be edited directly in the web app with comments and visual changes.
Voice dictation can be used to give Duet multiple instructions for editing a presentation.
Each task gets its own thread, which provides progress updates but can make navigation confusing.
The presenter compares Duet’s task organization to Claude Code Projects and likes its ability to work on tasks in parallel.
A scheduled artifacts recap can remind users to return to work they have already created.
The presenter says Duet’s real-time voice is less capable than OpenAI’s dot and would benefit from better progress awareness.
Duet can read local Claude Code sessions but cannot start or control a new local session.
The presenter also notes that Duet lacks a model picker and sometimes requires approval for actions.

Chapters

Start	Chapter	Summary
00:00	Introduction and the standalone app	The presenter introduces Duet and its early-access status, then describes its standalone iOS and web apps and channel-based interface.
04:11	Sponsor break	A sponsored segment discusses using a cloud VPS to keep AI agents running when a laptop is off.
05:13	Creating and editing artifacts	The presenter demonstrates commenting on a slide deck and using voice mode to request several edits.
08:49	Task threads and task organization	He explains how tasks create their own threads, demonstrates a slide-deck task, and reviews its progress and result.
13:34	Comparison with Claude Code Projects	The presenter compares Duet with Claude Projects, highlighting parallel tasks and the inability to start local Claude Code sessions from Duet.
16:45	Artifact reminders and real-time voice	He recommends an artifacts channel with scheduled recaps, then tests Duet’s real-time voice and compares it with other apps.
19:53	Comparisons, approvals, and limitations	The presenter reviews Duet’s strengths and constraints, including its access to Opus 5.5, approval prompts, and lack of local session creation.
21:28	Drawbacks and desired improvements	He summarizes the confusing chat structure, missing model controls, and his hopes for better voice features and local Claude Code access.

Quotes

this app, Duet, by Anthropic, is in early access. — 01:03

commenting and and editing documents directly inside the web app is incredibly easy. — 06:16

Anytime that you create a new task, it actually creates a new thread for that task. — 09:23

you cannot ask it to create a Claude Code session in the Claude Duet app — 15:08

there is no model picker. — 22:30

Concepts and entities

Claude Duet, Anthropic, Opus 5.5, Riley Brown, Claude Code, Claude Projects, Dots, Grok Bot, Bluehost, Jev

Full transcript (original language)

00:00 You probably have already heard the news by now, but Anthropic just announced a brand new standalone app called Duet, [music] and it will directly rival Muse, Grok bot, and Open AI’s dots. And it will be fully powered by Opus 5.5. And so, I’ve spent around 10 hours using this app for my business, content, creating apps, and presentations, and I’ve been writing down all my thoughts, and I’ve distilled those thoughts down to nine things that you need to know about Duet. The first thing that you need to know about Duet is that it is an iOS app and a web app, and it is a

00:32 standalone app. Open AI decided to put their agent platform dots inside the ChatGPT app, and you can either create a new chat, or you can chat with your dot, but Anthropic went in a different direction. As you can see here, I have my Claude app, and then I also have my Duet app, and I can open this up, and this right here is the Claude Duet iOS app. So, let’s go ahead and get the most annoying thing out of the way. This app, Duet, by Anthropic, is in early access.

01:03 But, rumor on the street, if you DM this guy, Richard Kim, CW Richard Kim on X, he might be able to give you access. It worked for me, it might work for you. Now, I want to talk about the experience. So, the second thing that you need to know, and this will probably be your first impression of the app, is that it is incredibly snappy, easy to use, and there’s something new called channels. This here is the iOS app, and it feels a lot like the other agent apps that we’ve tried so far, like Grok bot,

01:35 like dots, except instead of having these bots, they have these things called channels. So, Claude Duet isn’t personified. That’s the first thing that I realized. You know, Grok bot, your dot, your Muse, like all of those have mascots, whereas Duet, it’s kind of has a like musical themes. And then, it reminds me more of Slack, where we have these channels. And so, so far, I’ve created like 10 different channels and I ended up deleting them because it added clutter. And so far, I just have content, finances, and then artifacts,

02:06 which I’ll get to a little bit later. But, the first thing that you realize is the app just is so snappy. And it’s really easy to just get around and it’s just a great interface and design for an app. And I really like the voice dictation here. Um and I could say something like “Hey, can you please add something at the end of our uh the presentation we were last working on in the content channel, add that I really like voice dictation just as a little bonus slide at the end.” And I can fire that prompt in. And just like the other

02:38 agent apps, you can see that they’re typing. We have a little bit of animations here. If I click on this, I can see all of my connections. I said, “Hey, can you please add something?” It responded here in the content channel. So, I can click on the content channel and here it takes me and says, “Adding the voice dictation bonus slide to the end of the of the duet deck.” Duet deck is a task that I can open up and here we have a slide deck. And this slide deck is actually the slide deck that I’m working on for this presentation. And

03:09 so, it’s adding something to the end of this presentation. And then all of this information is synced. So, this is real-time synced with the web app right here and I can open this up right here. So, we can go to the end of the presentation. It added it to the end. And so, we are very easily able to go from the iOS app to the web app. You can see here it added this to this presentation right here. We have the voice dictation slide. What I really like about this app, down here at the bottom, it has tasks. And so, it has

03:40 active, up next, and we have this make tab right here. So, if I click make, here we have all of the things that I’ve created. Um this is another slide deck that I’m working on and it’s very easy to just see all of the presentations that I’ve created. So that’s kind of the layout. You have chat, you have tasks, and then you have your artifacts or your make tab, and then you have this one agent chat along with sub channels that you can create. You can create a new channel

04:11 by pressing this channel, and the channels that I’ve made are content, finances, and artifacts, and you can just talk to your main agent, and if it’s content-related, it’ll automatically delegate it to this content tab. And that’s how everything kind of stays organized. Quick break because this part of the video is sponsored by Bluehost. AI agents can now work for hours on their own. Tools like Jev help agents make decisions about what to do next, but those agents still need somewhere to run. Agents write code, call APIs, and work through tasks while you’re away, but most of these

04:43 agents are still running on our laptops, and if your agent runs on your laptop, putting it to sleep can interrupt the work. If an agent is supposed to work on its own, it needs its own computer. So I gave mine one, a Bluehost VPS, basically a computer in the cloud that’s always on. I get full root access, so I can install the software and dependencies my agent needs, and it can run in the background around the clock. The VPS gives my agent somewhere to keep running

05:13 even when my laptop is off. If we’re going to treat AI agents like digital workers, we should start giving them their own computers. Check out Bluehost with the link at the top of the description to start building and running your own AI agents. And the third thing that you need to know about Claude Duet is that the experience of creating any sort of asset, whether that is a slide deck, whether that is a Figma-style design mode mockup, it’s really easy to add things. They have I forget what they call it, it’s called a

05:43 comment tool, so I could just comment on this, and I could just say, “Make number three adding comments great artifact editing on web.” And I can add this comment, and you can see here it automatically sends this to my duet. And so, [clears throat] duet is now going to make the edits, and it will show up here. And then I could come here and just say, “Hey, can you make these super easy to comment, and then add an image on this slide right here, which is the thing three details page, except crop

06:16 out the little edge here.” And so, the point I’m trying to get across for number three is that this like commenting and and editing documents directly inside the web app is incredibly easy. And it’s as easy as their baked-in design feature. And look at that, it added that image to the board, and um yeah, added two little bullets, um basically super easy to create assets, great for presentations, and baked straight into the web app and iOS app. And it should add these bullets here,

06:46 but again, you can add these bullets directly. I don’t have to do it through duet. It’s so fast when making edits. And then the fourth thing that you need to know about duet, that is very similar to number three, is that you can use voice mode to edit artifacts. And this is actually my favorite way to create any sort of like digital deliverable, whether that is a presentation or a slide deck, is I actually take my phone for a walk, and I’ll open up the slide deck. So, I’ll have my phone open, and

07:17 you can get to a slide deck that you created either through the make tab, you have the nine things that you know about Claude Duet, or I can click on this uh right here, and we have this slide deck open. I can very easily zoom in on the slide deck. But instead of typing my change here, you actually can’t use voice. What I’ll do is I’ll exit out, and I’ll just turn on voice right here with this button. Hey, I want you to make some changes to the presentation. um Um and yeah, I want you to make a good amount of changes.

07:48 On all the slides that has nine things you need to know about Duet, can you please make that like there should be a line break after need, and then make the text a little bit bigger. For the voice mode above the little timeline we have at the bottom, can you please make a cool little graphic that’s only gray, that’s just like very elegant and nice, and kind of brings attention to the middle. And then add one little bullet there based on how um how I’ve been using Duet so far. And then after slide 19, I want you to add a standalone slide

08:18 that just has text in the middle, and have the text say, “I’m not sure how I feel about this one.” And put this after slide number 19. Okay, so once I’ve done announcing all of my changes, I can hit the X. It’s been recording my voice the whole time, and we can fire off that prompt, and now it’s going to make all of those changes. So this allows you to just get it to create version one of a slide deck or anything, and you can just turn on your voice, and then just go through it saying what changes you want on each one, and then now Duet is just

08:49 going to go through with Opus 5.5 and make all of the changes that I suggested in this paragraph right here, which is really cool. And so that’s how I’ve been using voice mode with Artifacts. And so the fifth thing that you need to know is that every task gets a thread. And just so you know, I’m not sure how I feel about this one, because this one is a little bit different. So this is actually where I start to get lost in the app a little bit because of all of the different levels. So when I first try to create a slide deck inside Claude Duet, in this main chat right here, like

09:23 within this chat, I asked it to create a slide deck. Claude then delegated that, or put sent a request inside the content channel. And then after thinking for and working for about 10 minutes, it said, “Your Duet deck is ready to look over.” And so, I saw this link, and then I clicked on it. And then when I clicked on it, I realized there’s another chat thread. So, anytime that you create a new task, it actually creates a new thread for that task. And so, every

09:54 change that I’ve requested about this document right here goes into this chat session right here. And so, you have your main session that can be put into a channel, and then if you start a task in any channel, it’ll create a new task thread. And so then in the task thread, then we have the doc. And so then you can chat in the content channel about this document, and that’s

10:24 how you make changes. So, it’s a little confusing. Let’s go through an example right now. Okay, so here in the main thread, I’m about to run this. I’m going to say, “Hey, I have a new task for you. I want you to create a slide deck, uh which is a Q4 predictions, and I want them in the same format as the Duet doc with the grid, and I want to do a let’s do nine predictions for Q4, but before that, we need to have a where we are now section. Uh look at my previous

10:57 videos and predict what my predictions are. And now it’s going to create this. So, let’s see what it does here. Let’s just kind of go through the flow. All right, so it’s starting off by going through my uh past videos. And so look, it says Claude Duet added this task, Q4 agent predictions deck. So, if we click on this, we can hit open task. So, this task opens up a sub thread. And so now, we have the main chat here and the sub thread here. And so, that’s kind of how

11:29 this is organized. You have your main chat, you can chat with Duet in channels, and whenever you create a task, it’ll spin out a new this is a task session. And then you can see here we have ready for review, we have working. So, right now we know that the Q4 AI agent prediction deck is basically in progress. It’s currently working on it now. And then you notice here there’s some more organization. So, if there’s a task going on inside content or any of the different channels, you’ll see it

12:00 under that tab. So, we have a content tab. If there was something working on in finance, it would show up under the finance heading right here. And then I really like this view right here. They really made it simple within like a task thread. You can kind of see exactly what it’s doing. So, you can see that it’s studying Claude Duet’s deck format. It read through videos for pass for Riley Brown’s uh views, research where AI agents stand now, write the nine predictions, and now it’s building the deck. And then let’s say I didn’t have

12:31 this open, it gives you little updates in your main chat thread. So, it’s done. And so, anywhere anytime you see this little like this card right here, this is an artifact. Anytime it’s like underlined like this, that’s this is the this is the task thread. So, that’s kind of the difference between those two links. This is the actual artifact. This will open the artifact right here. Um and here it has the slide deck in the exact style that I really like. And here

13:01 ooh, this is kind of nice. Added some graphics. Ooh. See, like look at how insane this is. This is one shot. Um wow. Wow. And it And it’s went through all of my contacts cuz it has contacts over all my videos, all my notes, everything. So, this is probably going to be pretty accurate. Oh my god, this slide deck is nice. Really nice. So, this is cool. We just created this slide deck, and you can do all of this from your phone, and use your voice to edit it as well. Sixth thing that you need to know about Duet is it is a lot

13:34 like Claude Code Projects. So, in the Claude desktop app, if you go up here to projects, this is currently how I’ve been using Claude for a while. I just pin projects at the top, and so you have this master agent, and you can delegate to threads. So, you have master agent and threads, and then you can kind of keep track of all of your different tasks. And one of the main reasons I like this app so much is from my phone, right? If we go to my phone here, in the phone, what I can do here is I

14:05 can say, “Hey, can you please create a resource based on the Like, create a new thread local on my computer.” So, this is a new Claude Code session locally on my computer, which creates a new artifact that people can download on the Agent Native website, and it should have a way to download the PDF for the artifact called nine things you need to know about Claude, and make the resource name that as well. And so, what this is going to do is this will actually spin up a local session. So, I

14:36 can go out into the world, I can use voice, and I can ask the Claude app in Claude Projects to spin up a local session. And again, this is not on Claude Duet, this is on Claude Projects. And if I click on this right here, the first thing I’ll see is this little computer icon. So, this is running on my computer. And so, this is where I keep all of my files, so I can control Claude Code running on my computer from Claude Projects. However, as of right now, with Claude Duet, you cannot do this. I can

15:08 ask it to spin off a Claude Code session in the cloud, and it can do it, but you cannot ask it to create a Claude Code session in the Claude Duet app, which I really hope they add that feature, because there’s a lot of files on my computer, especially for video editing stuff. I would love to be able to access my Claude code locally on my computer. But that’s really the only limitation that I’ve seen so far with Claude Duet. It’s very easy to coordinate and do different tasks, and you can basically

15:40 have Duet spin off different tasks to do different things, so that allows you to do a bunch of things in parallel. And so I never really find myself, unless I’m like editing something like a slide deck, leaving this main chat session. Hey, spin off a new task right now that analyzes the trending topics right now on Twitter. If you use Composio, you should have a Grok Bot skill that you can use to scrape Twitter about the whole cybersecurity issue going on right now, and put this in an editable

16:13 document. And it’s just really easy to just talk to this agent. Now it’s going to delegate it, and so I can very easily continue on with a different task that doesn’t have to do with this, but I can kind of work on things in parallel. And so that’s kind of how I find it to be similar to Claude projects, which I use all the time. But this one is more proactive, and I feel like they’re going to merge these two features at some point because they’re strikingly similar. So the

16:45 seventh thing that you should absolutely do inside Duet is you should create an artifacts channel or a tasks channel, which nudges you to go back to previous things that you’ve worked on. So we can create a channel called artifacts. Really cool about channels is you can set up routines that live inside the channel. Let me show you what I mean. So if you show the tasks, you can see your scheduled tasks. And you can see here that we have an artifact recap right here, and we can see that it’s going to

17:17 run 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. And so, I get a lot of ideas, right? I’m a content creator. I create a lot of these documents, sometimes to send to my team, sometimes for myself, and it’s really useful to have a dedicated space where all I do is get like I’ll get reminded to work on things that I’ve already created. And so, every day at 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., I get an Artifacts recap. And so, it’ll be like, “Hey, you created this slide deck yesterday. Do you want to continue working on it?” And I’ll be like, “Oh

17:47 yeah, I forgot I created that. I need to do that for my presentation or for my video. It’s really useful to have that because often times with AI, since they work for 15 to 40 minutes at a time, you want to be able to work on multiple things at once, and it’s easy to get lost. So, I have this dedicated channel, which basically resurfaces all the things that I’m working on. And I find this to be incredibly useful. And so, the eighth thing that you need to know about Anthropic’s new platform, Duet, is their real-time voice feature. So, inside this Duet app, I can press this

18:19 button right here. >> Hey, buddy old pal, what’s going on? >> Your ex-girlfriend >> Can you give me just just give me like a little like one um one sentence or two sentence summary of that? >> Sure. >> Okay, okay. Um can you send an email to emily@agentnative.ink uh giving her this little breakdown, please? Okay, so the voice is not It doesn’t sound as human as the OpenAI dots one. And you also can’t mute it, right? Like there’s there’s nowhere to mute myself. Like I can’t really mute myself, which is kind of annoying. One thing I do like about

18:49 this is it starts immediately compared to dots, where like if I were to call my dot, right? I have to like wait for it to dial. And sometimes it takes up to like 20 seconds for it to answer, which is not the vibe. Hey. Anyway. Okay, so it’s very early in the stages here, clearly, because like it literally was just like, “I don’t know if it was sent.” And dot is an amazing experience when chatting with voice. I’ve been talking about this a lot. I’ve been going 45 minutes a day. I just talked to an agent. It does things for me, sends

19:20 emails, all my Slack. It’ll just be like, “Yep, I sent it.” Or yep, I I like and I’ll say like, “Hey, can you just uh before you send it, can you read it to me?” It’ll read it to me and I’ll be like, “Yep, send.” And then it’ll just send. And so, I love real-time voice. Absolutely love it. But, Claude seems to be far behind um OpenAI on this one. And I think it’s really interesting to compare the features of all of these different personal agent platforms, right? We have Claude Duet, we have OpenAI’s dot, we have Gemini’s Spark, which like kind of doesn’t even exist. We have Grok bot, we have Hermes agent,

19:53 um Instinct, um Muse, and Open Claw. And we can see here that there’s actually no desktop app for Claude Duet yet. Cuz remember, Duet’s still in early stages. And my main thing so far, I really like that I have access to Opus 5.5 in Claude Duet. That’s my biggest benefit for using it. I also think the interface is much easier and it’s a standalone app compared to dot, which is like built into ChatGPT. And one thing to note is I explained

20:25 earlier that Claude Duet cannot spin up new Claude sessions, but it can read the local Claude session. So, if you’ve created Claude code sessions on your computer and it’s on, you could ask it, “Hey, like Claude code session I ran 2 days ago, like can you summarize that?” And it would be able to go back and do it. It just can’t create or type posts inside of a Claude code session that’s local on your computer. And that’s different than dots because dots can actually do that. If I talk to my dot, I can spin up code act sessions. You cannot do that with Duet. One thing

20:56 to note that I noticed is there are some approval before important actions. Specifically, when it wants to send a message, it’ll ask for your approval. I want slightly less approvals in my uh Claude Duet. I would prefer less approvals. And then obviously payments. This one’s actually a good thing. So before you try and make any sort of payments or you’re doing any signatures and any deletions. So I noticed I was trying to remove a video from a notion database. It asked me for approval which I thought was a little bit annoying, but also I understand why it’s useful to ask

21:28 for approval before it deletes anything in an app. There are some points where you’ll run into approvals. Okay, so now for the ninth thing that you need to know and this one is multiple things and these are all the the negatives about Claude Duet so far. The first one I’ll add that’s not on this list is I think the real-time voice is like 5% as good as dots and even Grok bots real-time voice is pretty good. So that’s the first one. It’s not on the list. Um the first thing I will say is it’s pretty easy to get lost between

21:59 channels, tasks, and threads. I think having three types of chat threads is a little bit confusing. You have your main chat, you have your channel chats, and then your task chats. And so it’s it gets harder to explain the software. The more levels you go, it gets infinitely harder to explain. Because like are these called chats or these threads? Right here you just have a chat. You’re chatting with an agent, right? Now you’re chatting with an agent in a channel. Now you’re chatting with a

22:30 task chat inside a channel. And so you can get lost. That’s all I’m trying to say here. So be wary of that. Another thing to note is that there is no model picker. Which might actually be okay because it uses a great model Opus 5.5, but it also sets the effort level. So you can’t say, “Hey, use Opus 5.5 at max or at the max thinking or medium thinking.” You can’t do that. And then you can’t you can’t create Claude code sessions. You can see here I created it with voice here. So it added codex, but

23:02 you can’t create local Claude code sessions, which I already brought up before. That will be the biggest thing for me. So, the two biggest things I hope they add within the next few weeks, Anthropic if you’re listening, is I hope they add real-time voice that gives you better visibility in what it’s doing. So, it can just spin off Claude code sessions. It can spin up um tasks to do your email, and it’s just like, “Yep, I’ll get on it.” And then as soon as it’s done, like it’ll be able to tell you exactly where it’s at in the in the process. I noticed when I was

23:32 talking to the real-time voice agent inside Duet, it wasn’t really real-time aware of where the process was. Where if you ask Dot, say like, “Hey, like I know you’re doing research uh before you send the email, but like where are you in the process?” And it’ll tell you exactly where it’s at. Whereas Claude Duet, it’s not quite like that. It doesn’t feel as smart. And then obviously, I want to be able to use Claude code from it. And so, if I can use Claude code, cuz all my video editing workflows are local on my computer. And so, I want to be like, “Hey, spin up a Claude code session. You already have the footage that I filmed yesterday. Can you please create a um

24:04 video edit um that’s like this like this like this, and then upload it to Google Drive.” And that would be really cool in Duet to be able to spin up local Claude code sessions. I really hope they add it. I highly anticipate they will. And yeah, there you have it. Thank you guys so much for watching. I will be making a much more in-depth tutorial on this as it gets better.