To start using Claude, you need to create an account, which requires an email address and a password. Signing in brings you to your dashboard. Claude has the same basic design as pretty much every chatbot: A text field for starting chats sits in the center alongside a left-hand sidebar that shows your conversation history. Buttons below the central text field provide ideas on what exactly you can use Claude to do, from vibe coding to writing a case study.
Claude’s core design might not be vastly different from other chatbots, but I enjoy interacting with it more. Its color scheme, font, and slightly blockier aesthetic are pleasing and make it feel less sterile than ChatGPT or Gemini. Even across deep research progress screens and settings pages, Claude’s interface is cohesive. It is consistently tidy and readable.
(Credit: Anthropic/PCMag)
From your dashboard, you can talk to Claude about anything. Responses aren’t quite as snappy as with Gemini, but they aren’t as consistently slow as with DeepSeek. Once you get a response, you can copy or regenerate it. An easily accessible share button is at the top of the screen. Sometimes, responses hang or encounter errors during generation. However, this isn’t a major problem with Claude, and all chatbots trip up occasionally.
ChatGPT has had issues being overly friendly in the past, but Claude’s tone, by default, is closer to Gemini’s. In other words, you can expect more direct, slightly stiffer responses. However, you can customize Claude’s personality to your liking, like you can with ChatGPT. Claude calls these styles, and a variety are available to choose from, such as concise or formal. You can also create a custom style simply by describing how you want Claude to communicate or providing an example. That’s not the end of the customization options, either. You can tell Claude to keep any manner of personal preferences in mind or to refer to you by a certain nickname, too.
When it comes to memory, Claude’s doesn’t persist across chats, like it does with ChatGPT and Gemini. As a result, you have to remind it of prior conversations if you want to pick up where you left off. Claude can remember certain things you tell it, like the aforementioned personal preferences, but that’s it. The lack of persistent memory makes for an overall less satisfying chatting experience, especially if you talk to Claude about many topics.
(Credit: Anthropic/PCMag)
Like DeepSeek, Claude doesn’t support speech-to-text or voice chat on the web. However, like Gemini, Claude does offer a voice chat mode for its mobile apps. You can choose from a variety of lifelike voices, albeit ones that don’t sound quite as natural as Copilot Voice, and converse about all the same topics you can over text, including files you upload.
However, Claude’s voice chat mode is uncharacteristically clunky. It isn’t free-flowing, like with Gemini, meaning you (typically) need to click send after speaking. Claude sometimes responded to me before I sent my message, however, which made for an inconsistent experience. The microphone is always active in voice mode, too; it doesn’t even turn off if you minimize the app.
