Introduction: a “brain in your pocket” via WhatsApp

I'm here to talk to you about a brain in your pocket and I'm hoping that actually, yeah, if I bring this over you'll be able to see I've just got my phone up there and I will be jumping into, yeah, this little WhatsApp group that I created. So we'll pull that off to the side for now. This is Claude, just in your average, everyday WhatsApp group.

You might have seen Meta, but I don't really use it because I don't want Meta spying on me and doing all kinds of stuff with the information.

So I'll take that away for now, and we'll come back to it.

Where the Claude-on-WhatsApp idea came from

Right, so, yeah, hi, I'm Adrian Shedden. um a whatsapp chat with claude grounded in you now how do we where did this come from basically

um i saw a recent release from uh anthropic who provide claude like your chat gpt and um and grox and and others and uh they said oh yeah we're making uh it possible for you to interact with with Claude your AI but through WhatsApp and that came out on Friday the 20th and I kind of thought

oh yeah that's really cool I'll just spend a little bit of time building against that and yeah it took me about I don't know 30 minutes 45 minutes and then suddenly I had Claude in my pocket and I was like hey guys in this AI chat that I'm part of I was like look at this it's amazing um and uh yeah people are like oh okay that's pretty cool um and since then i've used it

every single day and not just me but my partner some friends other family members and the beauty of it is that it's all grounded in me in my partner Becky in the fact that we are soon going to have a little baby boy June due on the 18th of June thank you

One brain, multiple channels: grounding the assistant in your life

and so what you can see here is that I've listed four channels there's more channels but four channels one brain it runs off basically everything that is me me.

And it connects to my calendar, to my emails, to my WhatsApp. It gets the whole context, which means when I ask it to do something, it's really, really personalized.

So here you've got

like a little bit of a top left, Claude Metanova. That's what I've called it for now.

Morning briefs and a family-focused context

It's got a brief every morning that just pops up and it tells me what's landed recently, anything that my agents have been working on overnight. And it tells me what's important because it can read everything in context and it goes, hey, this is really important.

Claude Bobbles, our little one's called Mini Bobbs. My partner's called Bobbs. I'm called Bobbs. We're Bobbles.

It says over there, I don't know whether you can see it, but Becky, 31 weeks plus five days pregnant, 58 days to due due date okay that can sometimes freak us out a little bit so i i removed that in the uh subsequent ones but it's got like today's parenting calendar no parenting specific things today and i was like

okay cool so every morning i just get a brief of like it goes hey dude slow down what's your energy like okay these are the things that are important to you and if i go i'm freaking the fuck yeah i

I can swear. Fuck out.

It goes, okay, crisis mode. Let's strip all of that back and just focus on these things. Go and give Becky a hug or something like that.

Security, trust levels, and public vs private chats

And then in the bottom left, I've got Claude Security because I've just set up a public group, and I was like, oh, I'm going to give it access to you guys. 1And as much as I love you, I don't know any of you.

So, you know, Claude Security gives me little alerts if things are happening. And then the Minds in Public one.

So yeah, one laptop or server and four different amounts of trust.

Live demo: querying MindStone Bristol in real time

So I'm going to do the live demo. And where are we? Come over here. There we are.

OK, so in here, this will be interesting to see. I don't know whether Whisperflow will work if I do this. Hey, Claude, can you just tell me a little bit about MindStone and MindStone Bristol? Oh, yeah, that does work. Cool.

So right now, it's going off, and it's doing a little bit of work in the background, which I will drag over. the difficulty with having multiple screens We there we're there okay, so you can see down here in the bottom left.

It's caramelizing apparently But you can see all of these things these are from Previous kind of processing elements, and it's gone. Oh replied with a short intro all right.

Let's see what you got now Okay, so it says

There's, sure, Chord is a global community about people who are actually doing things with AI, not just talking about it. Runs in -person meetups across cities at short talks. The vibe is practical, real projects, real lessons, real tools.

Mindstone Bristol is a Bristol chapter. An evening meetup with speakers who build with AI day -to -day.

Okay, that's fine. It's done a decent job. job.

What about if I say, can you tell me anything about the speakers on 22 April? I've not actually practiced this, so this is just on the fly.

So down here, you can see it's acknowledging it, it's kind of working stuff out, and it's received processing. So what

A small UX lesson: acknowledgements matter in chat

What I found was I need an acknowledgment, because if I'm just in WhatsApp and I type something into the void, I'm like, did it receive it?

OK, the speaker lineup for tonight lives on the MindStone Bristol Luma page. And the running order up on stage? OK, so it's clearly not gotten it very, very correct.

When the demo goes off-script (and why)

Now, what I want to show you is if I go to, and bear with me, I'm just going to pull this over and switch across cross to Metanova so that you can, but I don't want to share other people's stuff. So that's just an example of something that where it's not quite gone right.

Let me see. Here we go. All right. So,

So I'll, okay, it's got, back to Jack work here, okay, Rob's business, oh, I just launched a website today, and I was like, I've never built a website before, and I got building it yesterday, and I think it looks pretty cool, but Rob, my mate, he builds websites, and he was like, that's pretty awesome, and so I just thought that's in there, so I've I've pinned that.

Let me give it a few prompts that actually make sense. I'm going to show you how to build this in a sec. So can you just summarize my skills by groups and areas and in ways that people at MindStone might find relevant?

And then whilst it's doing that, I'm I'm just going to send Oli's transcript over to a Cloud Code Files and make sure that it's there so that we'll do a little something that might be impressive or not. We'll see.

I was hoping to get Twilio installed so that I could then get it to call Valve and then deliver a short one -minute summary, but I didn't get it hooked up in time. so

Where are we? Navigating this is really hard when you're There you go

So right now it's going Summarize my skills, and it should come back But this is a live demo so We'll just wait two three seconds this won't be going to this server. It's going to a different one and It might be the case that it's just No, it's it's there. It's working away few

Okay back on this All right, six groups Minds are framed. Okay, AI ops particular practitioner not consultant Three tiers, what's this gone off on?

Okay, so clearly the demo isn't working too well Because I'm trying to do a few things Okay, that didn't quite work.

Can you take a look at the recent transcript on Claude Code Files on Drive that has a transcript from Oli's talk? Just summarize it and do a one -minute text -to -speech and send it as a summary to Oli Christensen in WhatsApp using Beper MCP, and I'll continue with the demo. All right, so we'll see whether that works and in the meantime.

I'll come back to With four minutes to go I'm gonna come back to the

How we do this so? We're gonna have to deny that that's why it's not working, so So there's a refresh of my permissions

where it gets access to various stuff. And we had to refresh it earlier today. And obviously, it's decided to fall over during the demo. So I'm just going to explain to you how it all works.

It's really insistent. So the whole point of this is the m - Go to front.

Ah, I've got to love a live demo. There we go. All right. So the point about all of this is lockdown is demo safe.

What went wrong: permissions, grounding, and “demo-safe” lockdown

1So when you saw those examples of what it was saying about Mindstorm Bristol, it just wasn't really grounded in any facts. It was making stuff up. And that's because with everything that I do,

I give it a lot of permissions. I give it free reign within a very large sandbox. But then it means that I need to really dial those in. But for this demo with the Mindstone Bristol WhatsApp,

I had to really lock it down. And so that meant that it wasn't able to rely on a bunch of tools.

The underlying setup: WhatsApp + Beeper Desktop + Claude Code

So the repo is the brain that makes it actually useful. And the architecture is basically, you've got a phone, you've got WhatsApp, you've got something called Beeper Desktop, top, which is running down here.

It's a free app that just translates things between Claude code that helps run things in the background and WhatsApp. And then it enables the replies.

And this thing forwarded to Claude's security chat. It won't trigger right now because I didn't do anything insecure. But it's what earns its keep.

How to build it yourself: the six high-level steps

Now, there are six steps for you to take if you wanted to have that functionality.

I'll be showing this in the WhatsApp group and I can share the slides with you.

But it's basically install Claude code, then give Claude context about you, then ask Claude to read the documents and grab the template all from Anthropic from the website, site, and then ask it to install beeper, and then ask Claude to wire it up.

All of those prompts, from two to six, you just have a natural conversation with Claude, and it can work it through.

So it's really, really insistent. It's not going to work, but we'll see.

Picking the right prompt for the context you’ve provided

So yeah, you can try different prompts with different contexts needed. So the top one, very minimal context, maybe just your location.

The next one, give me three things to focus on today. It kind of needs some background about you.

And then prep me for a client meeting, use my usual format. Needs lots of context about you.

So there's the group that you can join if you want to and try it out. It's a bit of a kind of demo. It's very brittle. We'll see how it works

Conclusion: try the group, connect, and Q&A

You can connect with me on on LinkedIn or find out more about it. Check out my website see whether it's any good I'm very open to criticism

And pizza should soon be on its way.

So yeah, let's Just do one quick thing where we see Did it? There you go

Yeah, the auth key is lost so it can't get access to Google Drive So that's not gonna work. Sorry about that, but at least it told me so maybe that's part of the The demo anyway, there we go any questions