Visual and Interactive Content

What it is

Claude can answer with something other than a wall of text — a weather card, a recipe card, a diagram it builds on the spot, or a set of buttons to click instead of typing. Claude decides when a visual will read better than prose.

Three kinds, and they behave differently:

Data widgets — weather and recipes, backed by real data. These need web search on.
Custom visuals (beta) — diagrams, charts and interactive elements Claude builds from scratch in HTML, shaped to your question.
Interactive inputs — multiple-choice, multi-select or ranking controls Claude shows when it needs more from you before answering.

Where to find it

Visuals appear inside the conversation. The inspected Settings → Capabilities pane has an Inline visualizations control; no generated visual was tested.

On desktop

Any chat. Ask about weather, recipes or sport, or ask for a diagram or a chart.

On the web

The same on claude.ai. Custom visuals also work in Cowork sessions.

How to use it

Data widgets (weather, recipes)

Ask for current information. The unified experience searches automatically; older accounts may still have a web search toggle.
Ask naturally: “Should I bring an umbrella today?” or “Best chocolate-chip cookie recipe?”
Claude renders the card. Recipe cards let you change the number of servings or the units, or hit Get cooking for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Temperatures come back in Fahrenheit for US locations and Celsius everywhere else. Weather data is powered by Google Maps; recipe images by Bing Image Search.

Sport

Ask about a league Claude covers — NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, WNBA, MLS, NCAA football and men’s and women’s basketball, the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, the Champions League, tennis, golf, NASCAR, cricket and MMA. You’ll get results, live scores, fixtures, standings and box scores — as text on every platform, not as a widget. Detailed game stats aren’t available for golf or NASCAR.

Interactive inputs

When Claude needs more from you, it may offer buttons instead of a question — budget ranges to pick from, activities to multi-select, priorities to rank. They appear at the bottom of the chat. You can always type instead.

Custom visuals (beta)

The help guide says Claude can generate these automatically. Settings → Capabilities also exposes Inline visualizations. Ask for a visual such as:

“Show me how this process works” → a flowchart.
Upload a CSV and ask “What does the data show?” → an interactive chart.
“Help me decide between two options” → a side-by-side comparison.
“Visualise this system” → a diagram alongside the explanation.

Click inside it, move sliders, expand it to full screen, and keep asking: “make the chart monthly”, “add a third option”.

Keeping one

Custom visuals are ephemeral — closer to a whiteboard sketch than a file. To keep one:

Copy as image — a static snapshot for notes or slides.
Download — save it as .svg or .html.
Save as artifact — promote it to a full Artifact you can keep, publish and iterate on.

That’s the real difference from artifacts: artifacts are persistent and shareable from the start, custom visuals only stick around if you choose to keep them.

Good to know

Custom visuals work in Cowork, with two differences: the older custom-visuals article describes sharing limits for local Cowork sessions; this does not establish how unified cloud sessions behave, and clicking inside a visual doesn’t send a follow-up prompt the way it does in chat — type the follow-up instead.
Mobile is text-only for weather and recipes, and custom visuals don’t render on iOS or Android at all.
Shared chats render custom visuals on web and desktop only, and the recipient has to be logged in.
Opus is best at visualisation. Reach for a more capable model when the visual is complex.
Personalisation sticks. Tell Claude “make all my visualisations pink” once and it will remember.
If you wanted a visual and got text, rephrase with intent: “show me a diagram of…” rather than “do you know how…”.

What’s changed recently

2026-09-13 — Corrected a mistake: custom visuals do work in Cowork sessions. The page previously listed Cowork alongside iOS and Android as somewhere they don’t render. What Cowork lacks is sharing and click-to-follow-up.
2026-09-13 — Added the detail that sport data is text-only on every platform (with no detailed stats for golf or NASCAR), and that interactive inputs appear at the bottom of the chat.
2026-04-18 — Page created from the official help-centre article.