Stepping my toe into the agentic pool with Duet

I felt like a kid waking up on Christmas morning when I opened my phone to a notification that I had been taken off the Claude Duet waitlist - woo hoo! I had signed up for the waitlist when I saw the announcement on October 21. One of the caveats is the preview is limited to Pro and Max accounts; I have the Max account. Duet is Claude's new agentic feature, like ChatGPT's Dots. I only have a Plus subscription with ChatGPT so I don't qualify for Dots...yet. But I was fortunate to see Steve Little use Dots and it's pretty cool...like if Siri was smart.

First things first, I had to update the Claude app on my phone. I noticed after the update that a button appeared so you can have a conversation with Duet like Steve did with Dots. (BTW - Steve's Dot has a Silicon-Valley girl accent. I notice these things.) In trying out Duet's voice chat, the default voice it chose was a male British accent. I asked Duet where in Britain the accent was from and it would not give me a region, it referred to it as a "subtle British lilt". Yeah right Duet, go tell that to a British native! I am quite certain this "lilt" has a region and if I had to guess it's placement, somewhere around the middle, like Birmingham. I have been to England enough times to hear their regional accents, but if you try this feature, let me know your thoughts on the accent's region.  

I next asked Duet some more feature particulars and Duet replied, "Most AI tools wait for a prompt. Anthropic’s new app, Claude Duet, is built to do the opposite. It runs in the background, reports what needs attention, and works on tasks you assign." It also said that you cannot choose a model for Duet, it runs on Opus 5.5 and Anthropic gives you one token "Reset" you must use by Nov 30 if you tokenmax. ChatGPT's Dots uses Astra so I would blow through that in no time flat! I am thrifty by nature and that includes my tokens. 

Ok, kid in the candy store moment - what do I try first with Duet? Well, I'm a longtime genetic genealogist with an interest in epigenetics so I task Duet to compile a weekly summary of published scientific studies with keywords like "epigenetics", "methylation", "haplogroup", "mitochondrial" and "Y-chromosome". I give it two sites to query and Duet hits the wall just like the majority of informational sites have had to install from AI bots driving up their server costs. Not one to be easily thwarted, I find that both sites have smartphone apps and neither requires an account. I download both apps and give Duet permission to access those apps on my phone and do a test run. Worked like a charm! Doing a weekly summary is also token thrifty, I have only used 2% of my limits so far today. Please share your agentic genealogical uses as I would love to try more.