Anthropic (Claude) key

Bring your own Anthropic key to score and categorise mentions with Claude. Without an AI key, BackTalk falls back to a free offline word-list scorer that only labels obvious positive/negative and returns unknown a lot; a Claude key gives you nuanced sentiment, categories, and priority on every new signal.

What it unlocks

• AI sentiment (positive / neutral / negative) instead of the offline lexicon.
• Category and priority tagging on each mention.
• A one-time background re-score of your existing mentions when you save the key.

Your workspace runs on one AI key at a time. Saving a Claude key replaces whichever provider was active before (the app tells you before you confirm).

Get your API key

1. Sign in at the Anthropic Console.
2. Add a payment method under Billing (API usage is prepaid/pay-as-you-go and separate from a Claude.ai subscription).
3. Open Settings → API keys and choose Create key.
4. Copy the key. It starts with sk-ant-… and is shown only once.

Add it in BackTalk

1. Go to Settings and find the Claude (Anthropic) card under AI providers.
2. Pick a model (see below) and paste your sk-ant-… key.
3. Save. BackTalk sends one tiny test request to confirm the key and model work, then stores the key encrypted and starts the background re-score.

Models & cost

You're billed by Anthropic directly, at their token rates; BackTalk never marks anything up and only shows an estimate. Sentiment prompts are short, so real spend is typically a fraction of a cent per mention. List prices (USD per million input / output tokens):

• Claude Haiku 4.5: ~$1 / $5. Fastest and cheapest; the right default for sentiment.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6: ~$3 / $15. More nuance on ambiguous mentions.
• Claude Opus 4.8: ~$5 / $25. Most capable; rarely needed just for scoring.

Settings shows a live usage ledger (tokens and estimated cost) once scoring runs.

Troubleshooting

• "The provider rejected that API key." The key is wrong, revoked, or from a different org. Regenerate it in the console and re-paste.
• "That model isn't available on this key." Your account can't reach that model yet. Add billing, or pick Haiku.
• Key check failed / timeout. Usually no billing on the Anthropic account, or a transient network issue. Confirm billing, then retry.

Your key stays private. It's encrypted at rest and only decrypted server-side at the moment of a scoring call. The plaintext is never sent back to your browser and never written to logs. Settings only ever shows the last few characters as a hint.

Rotating your key: create a new key in the Anthropic Console, paste it into Settings to replace the old one, then revoke the previous key.