How to create a personal AI travel buddy using Claude AI (Anthropic) and OutSystems?
- Charos Abdukayumova
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
In most AI-related cases, we usually talk about “big” cloud titles like Azure, AWS, or OpenAI. But what if you don’t want to use heavy tools and still want accessible solutions for your organization, or you have a startup where you want to enhance user experience? In these situations, you can implement easier solutions.I did my research and found a startup company (at the moment of writing this post) that offers interesting AI solutions.
I want to share a light, fun side project I built using Claude by Anthropic integrated into an OutSystems app: an AI-powered Travel Buddy that suggests destinations based on your mood. It was not an easy decision to choose one tool, there are so many amazing AI solutions which can be used in different situations…
What will be covered?
What is Anthropic and the Claude AI model?
How Claude compares to OpenAI and AWS Bedrock
Pricing & usage
A quick overview of my Travel Buddy project built with OutSystems (or how you can set up two tools together)
Summary
Note: I will not cover UI details of setting up the OutSystems chat message widget.
🧐 What is Anthropic?
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded by former OpenAI researchers. Their flagship family of models is called Claude, designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless. Named after Claude Shannon, the models are known for their nuanced, conversational tone and strong alignment with user intent.
Claude is now on version 3 (as of 2024), with 3 model tiers:
Claude 3 Haiku — lightweight and fast
Claude 3 Sonnet — balanced and creative (used in this project)
Claude 3 Opus — largest and most capable
🔗 Who Uses Anthropic?
Several forward-looking companies and platforms have integrated Claude for its safety and natural-sounding responses:
Slack — Claude powers Slack’s AI assistant
Notion AI — Offers writing and summarization tools
Quora Poe — Uses Claude for general-purpose chatting
Amazon — Claude is available in AWS Bedrock
You can check out their official site to see a full list here.
🧵 Claude vs OpenAI vs AWS Bedrock
If you’re deciding which LLM to use for your side project or integration, here’s a quick comparison:
💸 Pricing and Usage
Claude’s pricing (Sonnet model) is competitive:
Input tokens: ~$3 per million tokens
Output tokens: ~$15 per million tokens
Free tier: includes starting credits (usually $5-$25, depending on region)
A prompt + response for a use case like mine typically costs under $0.01 per call (I paid 5$ for my project, and it was more than enough).
🏓 How can you set up two tools together?
Open your Console menu from here. If you have already set up your package selection, you can go directly to the API.
Give a name for your API and click the Create API key button.
Make sure you saved your API key and API request body. Before jumping to OutSystems, you can test your requests in Postman.
As you can see, a new API has been created, and I can track it from the API Keys Dashboard.
That was all to set up your API keys; make sure you reviewed the documentation to have a better understanding of your APIs.
Now, open your application in OutSystems. Go to the Logic tab, right-click the Rest icon, and select Consume API. From the pop-up, select Add single method and click the Continue button.
Use the POST method and below given URL address
As you can see, I am sending 3 input fields as well.
Make sure you added them as input values and changed the Send In drop-down to Header. Check the naming.
Your request headers content can be different than mine, but in general, you will have below given headers:
x-api-key anthropic-version: 2023-06-01 //can be different for you content-type: application/json //can be different for you |
Note: You can customize them by adding different values, which will affect your response content. Check out the official documentation for more information.
Go to your screen and use a chat message or another widget to test the result. Below you can see my results (I did not add loading-related UI changes).
🚀 Summary
Not every AI integration has to be serious or business-oriented. Tools like Anthropic make it easy to experiment and create fun, mood-driven tools with minimal overhead.
If you’re using OutSystems, you can quickly hook into Claude or other LLMs to create assistants, generators, or even just playful bots that make your app more engaging.
Feel free to remix this idea — use it to suggest books, jokes, affirmations, or fictional careers.
Happy building! 🚀
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