u/loosepantsbigwallet

Has anyone been able to turn cowork into a conversational assistant like you can with a normal web chat or mobile phone app chat?

I have a product concept of a completely voice-activated organisation, where Claude knows your brand, brand voice, what the company does, all the company intelligence stored in Claude.

Everybody works with a single view ecosystem touchscreen. An interface is verbally with Claude to get everything done.

I have the branded documentation skill set up, so all documents are created in Claude, on brand, in the brand voice looking the same.

The interactive ecosystem view of what’s going on in the business, outstanding actions, current projects etc. All set up.

Connections to document management, email data sources etc sorted out.

So I’m almost there, but my last step is to fully voice communicate with cowork so it all comes together.

Any ideas how I can get that working?

For anyone that uses Claude regularly, they announced a few months ago that you can use skills, set up with your brand information to create branded documentation directly in Claude.

I tried it out, but it doesn’t work very well.

So I spent the last two months trying to work out how to set it up, so it creates more aligned, on brand, on brand voice documents. PowerPoints, Word documents, proposals report anything really. All following your brand design standard logos, colours, tables all formatted the same etc.

It takes a lot of work, but you can use Claude prompts to create it all for you. I usually end up with about 500 pages of brand information total. To feed into the skill.

Here’s a list of all the documents I create, that are required to give the skill enough information to produce the same layout and format and voice:

First of all, customer avatar. Your brands ICP.

Customer pain points.

Customer journey

Brand positioning

Naming conventions

My voice standard. I collate all of my vocab and speaking style from all of the other chats where I use Claude talking on my mobile etc. This creates a mini guide for how I talk to help with the next stage.

Brand voice, important one as this determines what words Claude uses and are forbidden. If you get this one right and then create all documentation as if you wrote it yourself.

Team and contacts register, so you can just say “create a letter from Sam”, and it will use all of Sam’s details to create it. Job title phone details whatever.

Digital presence standard

Content creation standard

Design model, how you want things to actually look.

From that, a logo brand board

And finally, probably the biggest one the actual design standard.

Now that sounds like a lot of documentation, but many of you probably already have it if you’ve had a brand agency in to do a brand design. Those files get tucked away in a folder somewhere and never get looked at but you can actually adapt them. So Claude can use them to create the skill.

Now how to implement it:

You need Claude cowork, because it will collect all the documents from your filing system. And simply ask it to create a skill to enable your brand to be implemented within chats.

A skill zip file is created.

You add that skill in the customise section within the Claude desktop app.

The skill will be available in all online chat windows and the desktop app.

I found once I implement the skill and show people how to use cowork, they soon realise they just have to tell Claude what they want and it will create the document on brand.

It is ideal if you want to create a weekly newsletter for example, gathering information automatically using a prompt in cowork, and send it out via email without you even checking it if you’re confident enough.

I tell clients to treat it like a team of administrators, or interns, you might still have to check the output but now AI (Claude) produces non-generic output so you don’t have to download and reformat everything in PowerPoint or word.

You can probably do the same thing with ChatGPT, but I haven’t tried that.

Posted this on the Claude sub. Reddit suggested I post here. No idea this sub existed.

Anyone that does a lot of work in Claude might find it useful if you charge hourly, need to track against multiple clients and can’t be arsed with a spreadsheet.

Which was my exact reason for doing it.

It was my first “app” so it looks terrible and I’m not sharing a screenshot but it generates invoices backed with data. So it works for me.

Here you go here’s a summary if you want to do it.

Ortopylot Time Tracker, how it works

It tracks billable hours for clients and generates invoices, it watches what I do on my laptop, works out what was client work, and spits out a Word invoice. Anything it can’t tie to the client with confidence, it bins.

Three parts. ActivityWatch runs on the laptop and logs the active window and browser tab every few seconds. A script runs at 2am, pulls the day’s activity, sorts it, and writes it to the database. A Next.js app on Vercel with a Supabase database shows the dashboard and builds the invoices.

The sorting took a lot of getting right. Short bursts on the same work get merged into one block. Anything under 3 minutes gets dropped, so all the glancing and tab-flicking disappears. Correction rules run first, which are fixed title to job matches I’ve set up. Everything else goes to Claude Haiku, which reads each window title and decides which job it belongs to. If it’s 80 percent sure or more, it keeps it. If not, it bins it.

The hard part was the Claude and Cowork work. A tab that just says “Claude” tells you nothing about which client it was for, and the way I work, one job breaks into dozens of little bursts as I fire off an instruction then go do something else while it thinks. The fix was three things. Name the chats with the client in the title so the rule catches them. Let Claude use the whole day’s context, so a bare tab sitting inside a run of obvious client work gets read as part of it. And stop trying to classify the truly ambiguous ones. For a while it was forcing everything into a job and that’s what blew the hours out. Binning the unclassifiable work instead of guessing is what made the numbers more trustworthy.

A few things I learned. The Batch API is half price and the volume is tiny, so it costs under a dollar a month. The database caps queries at 1000 rows by default, which quietly broke half the totals until we moved the maths server-side. And everything runs on Perth time, because that’s what I invoice in.

Although I’m pretty technical I don’t code, so don’t ask me how I did it in detail. I can cut and I can paste. But I’m very good at describing how I want things to work to Claude.

I have a few friends that run small and medium businesses. Successfully.

Even though I constantly help them out and prove that using AI (mostly Claude) can solve any admin problem or task they have, they just don’t explore it and carry on doing everything manually.

Why?

I have a number of examples where they are struggling to do things, they send me the data or the presentation info, or just what they are trying to research.

And I will get it back to them in minutes, in their own brand.

They are amazed, but then next time go back to doing it the same old way. All the time complaining how long it takes to write and format everything.

Is it just they don’t know how to use it properly? These are smart people.

My niche/business is irrelevant.

But in general, does anyone have any luck with engagement through their LinkedIn company page?

Not their personal page, which I understand is more successful.

Seems so easy to use my other content to make LinkedIn posts as well but Claude tells me Company page content gets very little traction.

Not bother?