How to Use Claude Dispatch (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Key Takeaways

You're out of the office, no laptop, just your phone, and you remember that you need a report pulled together before a meeting. Normally, that's a problem, but with Claude Co-work Dispatch, you pull out your phone, type the task, and by the time you sit back down at your desk, it is done. Local files, Slack, email, Claude accessed all of it while you were gone. I'll show you today how to set this up, as well as a demo where we're going to build out a dashboard off of a spreadsheet, all while we're away from the computer. Let's jump right into it. So, to get started, make sure that you have Claude both on your phone as well as your computer. They should be the latest version. How you know it's the latest version, you'll have a tab on both of them that says dispatch. Now, I'm going to show you how to connect directly from your phone. So, make sure that you have your phone ready to go. You're going to see this on the screen. So, the first thing I do is click over to the side, and I go to dispatch, and you'll get a screen that says co-work with your thumbs. Dispatch tasks to Claude, and check in from your phone or computer all in one seamless conversation. I'm going to pair with my desktop. You can also email a desktop app link, but we're just going to pair this live. Once I click that, I'm getting a conversation that says looking for your desktop. Make sure you have Claude desktop app installed, open, and signed in to your account. So, while we're pairing with the phone, I should also do that on the desktop. So, make sure to click on dispatch, and then you get put to a screen that says co-working on the go. Dispatch tasks Claude in check in from your phone or computer in one continuous conversation. Your phone is like a walkie-talkie that can communicate with Claude on your computer. Just send Claude a message, and it'll work on tasks using your computer. Uh remember to keep your computer awake so Claude can keep working. That is one of the most important parts of this. Your computer has to be on. I'm going to click get started. Then we get put to another screen that says pair with the Claude mobile app. Use the mobile app to talk with Claude while it works on your desktop. Scan the code to download it on your phone. And then I clicked I'm signed in on my phone, and then we get put to the screen over here that says keep dispatch running. Again, super important that keep this computer awake, and it says prevent sleep while dispatch is running. So, if you have any conversation, you do not want your computer to go to sleep. Obviously, you can change the settings directly on your machine, or you could just click this on, and it says Claude is ready to use Chrome. Obviously, we want our Claude instance to be able to use Chrome when needed for like web scraping or research. And then it says all connectors are on dispatch can use every connector that you have authenticated. Once it's connected, you'll see we get put into a brand new screen that has a keep awake as well as allow all browser actions. And it says work with Claude right on your computer. Claude can work with your files, browse in Chrome, and use any connectors you've set up. You can also use tasks from mobile app, etc. And it says, "Hey Claude, you're here. Tell me what's on your plate. No ask is too big or small. You could ask me to." It gives a few different examples. You can also control this conversation from your phone. Download the Claude app for iOS or Android, then go to the dispatch tab. And we're going to do everything from our specific phone. Okay, now we are paired. It says your phone and desktop are now paired. Keep both apps online while dispatching work to Claude. Happy co-working. Then you'll see the screen has been removed, and now we have a conversation that is open with the Claude emoji. So, the first prompt that I want to test out in my Excel to PDF folder, can you give me a quick summary of what's in the final report spreadsheet? Now, I was very specific in here. I defined what folder I want Claude to look at. I also defined what exact spreadsheet I want to take a look at. It's really important that you define this physique and access anything on your desktop. So, you want to point it in the right direction. You don't want to have something just called a one. So, really important you label what folder you want it to access as well as that particular file. Otherwise, it might get lost. I get a response back that says, "Looking into your Excel PDF report folder for that final spreadsheet." Now, you can also see on a desktop we have a notification that it is searching and there's no prompt available on there. It's all directly on my phone. Have to allow permissions directly from the phone as well. You'll see we get quite a few of those. And then we have a specific response. I'll read this off my phone. It says, "Here's what's in the final report XLSX. It's a single sheet called Q4 review with 17 rows, seven columns. It's a departmental Q4 performance report tracking." Gives a little more information. Covers 15 departments, things like sales, marketing, and engineering. Basically, a straightforward quarterly performance summary. After that, I'm going to prompt it one more time. I'm going to say, "Can you build me an HTML dashboard in that folder? Just let me know when it's done here in the chat." So, HTML dashboard does take a little bit of time. Uh from past experience using Co-worker, sometimes it could take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes and we'll jump right through that. Okay, and then I got a text that says, "Dashboard is done and saved in your Excel to PDF folder as Q4 dashboard HTML. Just double-check to open in your browser. Here's what that includes. Five KPI cards at the top, headcount, budget, actual spend, revenue goal attainment rate, five interactive chart.js visualizations, a sortable data bit table with all departments, and two drop-down filters that update everything dynamically. Fully self-contained, no server needed." Let's take a look at that right now. So, this is our dashboard that was just built out. I'm going to double-click on that and let's take a look. So, we have our Q4 departmental performance. The department, we can choose specifically on which one we want. The goal status, goal met, goal not met, total headcount, budget, actual spend, revenue. And again, all this was just generated by just sending a message on my phone telling it to read the spreadsheet and build out this dashboard. Headcount, it's pie charts, goal attainment, budget variance, and then detailed department data. And we can sort this across the board. This would have taken me a lot of time to build this out in Python, especially with a tool like Streamlit. Now, obviously, this is an HTML dashboard. Uh there are limitations for this, but I'm very happy with those particular results. So, that was just one example of using Dispatch now in Cloud Co-work. Is this something that you are going to take a look at? I'm sure there's hundreds of different opportunities out there for automations, and I'd love to hear some of your guys' ideas down below in the comment section. If you want to learn even more about AI or Co-work, we're uploading at least three to four videos every single week on this channel. I would love to have you subscribe to it. And if you want to join our group, we have a free school group. We meet every single Wednesday. The link is down below in the description. See you guys in another video.