Cowork, Perplexity & Manus ‘Computer Mode’. Your complete AI assistant!
Computer Mode is here, and it’s changing everything about how I run my practice. If you’ve heard me mention it before and weren’t quite sure what I meant, this episode is where it all clicks.
In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m walking you through exactly how I’m using Computer Mode across Claude Cowork, Perplexity, and Manus to handle real tasks in my business without me being there. From renaming 67 files while I was at the gym to publishing a fully SEO-optimized blog post while I was getting ready for a podcast interview, these tools are taking time-consuming tasks off my plate.
AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:
- How Claude Cowork and the Dispatch app let you direct your computer from your phone while you’re away.
- How Perplexity Computer Mode wrote, researched, and published a full SEO-optimized blog post to WordPress without you at your desk.
- How Manus Computer Mode pulls a daily ClickUp roundup and delivers it as an organized report.
- Why giving your agents feedback after each task makes them smarter over time.
- What to avoid when using Computer Mode, including keeping PHI out of the workflow.
Mentioned in this episode:
AI Tools for Therapists – https://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/AI-Tools-for-Therapists
Perplexity – https://pplx.ai/hypnotrans66501
Manus – https://manus.im/invitation/KQM69QAMNAOQGH8
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
- Join the Clinical AI Club: www.clinicalaiclub.com
Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Run Your Private Practice with ai. every once in a while I like to do these updates when some big stuff happens with AI and it’s sort of changing the way that we use AI completely and there’s something out now, I’ve talked about it a little bit, I’ve alluded to a little bit in some of my other episodes, but it’s this concept of the AI computer for clinical AI club members and for our Thera AI hub members in the month of May.
[00:00:29] I’m splitting the month into two different topics, but one of the topics is computer using computer. I’m saying computer. It might sound weird, but that’s actually what these are called. For example. I’ve got my computer open, my actual computer, as you can see here, and I’m on it right now. But I wanna go through and just tell you guys how I’m using these.
[00:00:49] I’m actually making some videos. I think I’m gonna put them on my YouTube channel, just me walking through some of what I’m talking about today to be able to show you how I’m using it. So almost all the major ais have come out now with a version called computer, their version of computer. Claude Cowork.
[00:01:07] You’ve heard me talk about that. At first, I was a little like, I don’t know about this. I was excited. And then a lot of the automations I set up with the cowork computer failed for me, but that’s been fixed. So I’m using Claude Cowork computer, meaning I’m giving it a set of like multiple tasks that this thing does for me without me being present.
[00:01:29] I can also communicate with it through my phone. Claude has released something called dispatch. Which is a way to have the Claude app on your phone. You go to dispatch. Dispatch talks to the co-work computer, and as long as my computer is not sleeping and it’s on and I can be anywhere and I’m giving directions through dispatch to my computer.
[00:01:49] Through Claude Cowork, if you’re following along, I know this is a lot through Claude Cowork to be able to do things for me on my computer that I would normally have to be like present for like sitting on the computer and doing myself. So I’ve got Claude cowork. I’m gonna show you or tell you about an example I have that I’m using it for, and then perplexity.
[00:02:08] You guys have heard me talk about the perplexity browser. And all of these, I’m gonna put links down in the show notes. Of course, they are my referral links every time you click them and use them. I get credits or whatever for these different products, but. Perplexity computer now. Now I’ve got the perplexity browser and there’s a thing called Comet that I’ve raved about, right?
[00:02:27] Comet is the assistant that opens up on a sidebar and like works with you inside of your computer or inside of your web browser. So if you’re doing something, you open the assistant up and it’ll like take over and do stuff on your browser. But about two weeks ago, they came out with their version of computer.
[00:02:45] Computer’s a totally different thing. It’s a different pavement tier and everything, but of course I did it ’cause you guys know I love to try this stuff. So computer, I’ve got set up running on my computer as long as it stays awake. That’s the only thing with these, you have to like turn off your screensaver and everything and just leave it on and running.
[00:03:01] It can do these tasks for me that I’ve scheduled without me being home. So I’ve got a couple of those set up that I wanna tell you about. The next computer, Manus. Now you guys will probably hear me talk about Manus Does or did release sort of their agent that lived in Telegram, which is an app on your phone that you can communicate.
[00:03:19] It’s like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or something like that. So as of right now, I can communicate with my Manus agent through Telegram. However, Manus just released their computer, so they now have a computer that’s on my computer. It’s living in my desktop toolbar, that’s where all these are in my desktop toolbar except for Perplexities.
[00:03:39] That one’s still in the browser. And it’s just there. It’s just waiting for me to communicate with it. Now I can use the Telegram app and tell it to talk to the manus that’s on my computer now. All of these can access not only the web and the things that I’ve allowed them to log into, but they can also access and do things on my computer, for example.
[00:04:01] I used to sell hypnosis, mp3s. I think I’ve mentioned that before. That was like my side hustle back in like 2008. I had apps in the app store. But anyway, people still want these sessions sometimes. So somebody hit me up the other day and they said Hey, I wanna buy your entire catalog of mp3 downloads.
[00:04:17] And the store, they’re no longer available in the store. ’cause I got tired of dealing with it. It was a lot of like back and forth with people. So I shut it down. But they wanted everything and I was like, okay. So I was like, all right, $97, you know, just picked a number and said, pay me that. I’ll send you the whole catalog.
[00:04:32] And I thought they were gonna be like, that’s too much or whatever, but they didn’t. They said, okay, send it to me. So I sent the payment link from PayPal and they sent it back. And now I’m like, crap. Ugh. I looked, I’ve got a new computer, so I actually would have to go in rename all of my files by their actual name.
[00:04:46] ’cause right now they’re just like these code words kind of. So I told Claude Cowork to go in and do this for me. I was remote, I think I was at the gym when this was happening. I was like, oh my God, I’m gonna have to go home and do all this. And I was like, wait a second. Can computer do it for me? So it did.
[00:05:03] It went in while I was at the gym, I told him to do this, and I’m like talking to it through dispatch on the Claude app. And I said, I want you to go in. There’s a file folder, it’s called Hypnosis mp3. I want you to open each folder, find the mp3 file and give it a name that relates to the content that’s in the folder.
[00:05:20] And it, it knew how to do that. And I want you to rename them all and then I want you to put them in a separate file. Just all of the mp3 files. ’cause a lot of these have like, pictures with them and some graphics and stuff, but I didn’t need all of that to send to this person. So it literally went into every single file on my computer related to hypnosis mp3,
[00:05:41] I think it was 67 of them, rename them all. You know how you have to like click, you have to open up the window, you have to like rename a file. You have to type it in. You have to hit enter. Save it now you’ve got the file renamed. It did all of that for me and it figured out what to name them based on the context of the files and then like I asked it to, it moved it all into its own folder.
[00:06:00] And then I said, can you just like create a Google folder on my Google Drive and move all of these over there and put ’em in there because I just wanted to share the Google folder with this person that had just purchased like my mp3 library. It did it, it did the whole thing. It moved it over, put him in there, and then I just basically, did I email the guy back or, oh, I said, draft an email.
[00:06:21] I want you to draft an email. Tell him that I’ve got all of this information ready for him, and then when I get back, ’cause I wanna check the stuff I, when I get back, I’m gonna check it all and then I’m gonna send all this information out to him. Sure enough, all that was taken care of. I literally did that all while I was at the gym and I did not have to be on my computer at all.
[00:06:38] So that that was claude doing that for me. Now I wanna talk about some other ones, just to give you some ideas. Now, these are specific to my life and almost every time I figure out a way for these computers to help me, it’s because I’m like doing something and I’m annoyed. It’s like, oh my God, I do not feel like doing this right now.
[00:06:56] So I’m like, wait, let me see if the computer could do it for me. And then if the com computer can do it for me, I then tell it. I want it to set up as a reoccurring scheduled task. And a lot of these are so smart now, they’ll just set it up for you. You don’t even have to like know what to click and how to do it and how to set it up.
[00:07:11] And they’ll be, it’ll be like, when do you want it and what time? And I’ll be like, 7:00 AM every single day. So let me tell you about Perplexity computer. What I just did with it, and I recorded most of it, so I’m gonna put this on my YouTube probably later this week for people to be able to watch it.
[00:07:25] I had a podcast interview this morning. Somebody was interviewing me on their podcast and I had like an outline and I was like, you know what? This is a really good topic that I think. Other like therapists would wanna know about this too in case they don’t listen to this guy’s podcast. So I had an outline just like to remind me during the episode that I wanted to talk about.
[00:07:43] So I took the outline, I went in and this is what I said to computer. Perplexity computer. This is not regular perplexity comment. This is a separate thing that’s also inside a perplexity that you have to pay for.
[00:07:56] It’s a different version, but it’s the one that automates and does everything for you. So I said I wanna turn this into an SEO enhanced blog post and post it on my WordPress site. I need an image to go with it. And also the blog post needs to be SEO enhanced with Rank Math, and I said that’s in my WordPress site.
[00:08:14] And my WordPress site is here. So Rank Math is a free plugin on my WordPress site that basically like analyzes anything you’re putting in and make sure it’s optimized for SEO. But typically what I would have to do, so I’d have to take this outline, I’d have to think about it, right? I’d have to put it into a blog post.
[00:08:31] So I’d have to like translate it from. You know, this is an idea. It’s just some like ideas that I bulleted out for this podcast. I would have to get it. I’d have to write it out. I’d have to like have like the headlines and everything that you put in a blog post. I’d have to edit it. I’d have to make sure it sounds good.
[00:08:46] I’d have to go over to my WordPress site. I’d have to log in. I’d have to find where the blog posts are. I’d have to pull that up. And then I would like copy and paste. But in WordPress even to do any of that, you gotta like edit it, right? You gotta like change this to make it a heading. You’ve gotta make this like an H one and H two heading.
[00:09:03] There was ideas in there, but, and I’ll tell you in a second, but usually when you’re doing a blog post, like it always wants you to like link to external content and also link to content on your website. That’s like good SEO boosters. I learned all this through Rank Math. But anyway, all I gave it was that prompt.
[00:09:18] Okay. And then I went off and did something else. I actually went to get ready for that podcast I was getting ready to do, so I was doing that. We had a house cleaner here. She was cleaning. All of that was going on while it was taking over my computer and doing this for me. So I’m just gonna go through and like I said, I’m gonna put this video on YouTube probably later this week for you guys to watch it take over in the thinking and everything that it did in the product.
[00:09:42] It came out with the blog post lives on my website now it’s on clinical ai club.com/blog. So it’s the last blog post that I did on April 2nd, 2026 if you go there.
[00:09:54] So I wanna walk you through every, it’s like thought processes. So let’s see it said, I’d love to help you create an SEO enhanced blog post about this topic and publish it to your WordPress site. But then it had some questions for me, so it was just like what’s the content?
[00:10:07] ’cause I forgot to pay paste the content. And so I pasted my outline. And it said, do you have primary target keywords you want me to use or do you want me to research it myself? I said, I want you to research it. And what style of featured image do you want? And it gave me some options. And I said, just do an AI generated graphic.
[00:10:24] ’cause this is my AI web website. So I said all that and it said, let me get started. It literally did this. So it took my outline. You can see it in the history. It thought about it, it decided. What some good keywords were. It went out to the internet and did research on good keywords for what my topic was.
[00:10:42] It came back and wrote it into a blog post and opened up my WordPress site, which I already had open on my computer ’cause I wanted to help it along. I didn’t want it to be confused. Went in there, went in the back end, found where you put the blog post. It analyzed the style of my other blog post. It then took, its.
[00:10:59] Generated content, it pasted it into the blog post with all the right headings and everything that you needed to have there. And then the research it did based on just my rough outline, it pulled studies that supported what I was talking about, which would, was basically like. You know, how is AI assisting with therapy between sessions for, for clients and therapists?
[00:11:22] So that was the topic, but it went out and found research studies, it came back, it cited the research studies, it linked to them. Like it literally did all that without me. That was not research I did on my own. So it did all that, it optimized it for SEO and then it generated an AI picture. So if you go look at it, you’ll see the AI picture.
[00:11:39] It’s a therapist and a client sitting there, and then there’s like an AI like whiteboard behind the client’s head, like moving around or whatever. And it’s in a therapy office. So it’s a perfect picture for this. It matches the style of all my other pictures on my, on my blog post. Amazing. So it did that, it wrote the blog post and everything.
[00:11:57] Now it did get stuck. It told me it couldn’t upload the pictures that it generated and asked me to help it with that. So I did just download it, went to the blog post, uploaded it in the right place. It told me where to paste it, so I did that. And then I could see that it looked at the rank math, which basically is like a, it’s like an output.
[00:12:15] It’s like, okay based on what your, your blog post looks right now looks like right now it’s 27% optimized out of a hundred percent, basically. So I watched it, it went back and it said we need a better SEO ranking. So it went and it followed the instructions in Rank Math and, and this is what I would do.
[00:12:32] This would take me time to do this. It would probably take me about maybe 45 minutes to do this on my own. It went in, it used rank math’s suggestions, and it edited the content based on what rank math said it should be doing to increase the SEO score. So when it was all said and done, and you can watch the video on YouTube, I’ll put the link under here when it’s all said and done it.
[00:12:51] basically gave it a 76 out of a hundred score. I can’t even, when I do it personally, I usually get it to be about 70 and that’s pretty good for me. So anyway, it’s done, it’s posted, it wrote the content for me just based on some ideas that I had. What I talk about in the video, and I’ll say it here too, as I was watching it, there were a couple things that I wanted it to do differently.
[00:13:12] So I made note of that, and after all of these automations that I’m doing, I’m going back and I’m giving feedback just like I would to a virtual assistant that I was creating an SOP for, like a standard operating procedure for a task that I want her to do in my business because I forget the steps, right?
[00:13:29] I’m like, I don’t even know how I did that but watching it, I could be like, oh, it didn’t realize that it needs to do this. And I know because I’ve done the same thing. So watching it, I can now go back and say, I want you to make sure that you do this every single time. And it says back to you got it next time I’ll make sure I do it that way.
[00:13:45] It’s pretty amazing. and then you guys know in the clinical AI club and the Thera AI hub this month in April. I put two modules in Thera AI hub members. I put in a module around skills, so I’ve given you, I think I ended up putting like 17 skills inside of there for you already. I’ve got ideas for hundreds of them.
[00:14:06] It just takes time to make them. They’re in there. Clinical AI club. I taught you all how to make skills. There’s a module in that you can go back and watch. And of course, in our live implementation session coming up on April 7th, I think it is, I’m gonna be going over all that with you to show you how I did all of it live and answer any of your questions.
[00:14:24] But all that to be said with these automations, with these computer agents. You can upload your skills and that’s how it can learn how to do a task. So for this one I did with my blog post, I’m going to now in a little while, I’m gonna say, turn this into a skill. And it’s gonna download, it’s gonna say, here’s your skill, Kim, and then this version of perplexity computer is gonna have that skill forever with all of my edits, all of my improvements and everything.
[00:14:49] So next time I want a blog post and I’ve just got an idea, I’m gonna go post it over here and then the computer’s gonna take off and do the rest for me, and then leave it for me for final approval, which I’ve got that programmed in. Like I always want final approval, but you don’t have to.
[00:15:04] I mean, you could just say, do it without me, and it would do. It. And next time, for example, I’m gonna tell it to upload the picture, how to upload it and take care of that. There were a couple other little things I’m gonna go back and fix, but after, after you do these, just give it feedback. So if you want it to be a repeatable task, it’ll do it again and again and again.
[00:15:20] Now, another one manus computer lives on my desktop. I’ve got these, project management platform that I use called Clickup. It’s like my whole team’s in there, the social media people, the va, the online business manager, all of that.
[00:15:34] But I get all these tasks all the time. Like, Kim needs to look at this, Kim needs to approve this. You know, Kim needs to record this. Kim needs to follow up with this. So Manus computer, not the Manus agent, ’cause you can do this with the agent. But now that I’ve got the computer, the credit situation seems a little bit better for me.
[00:15:50] So I told Manus computer to set up a daily, sort of go into Clickup, do a roundup, come back and report it to me at the same time every single day. And it’s doing that just fine. It’s giving me like this really organized report that I can just go in and say, okay, oh gosh, okay, I gotta do that. And then you can communicate with it like, which one should I do first based on what you know about me or based on what my calendar says, you know, ’cause it has access to my calendar.
[00:16:17] I can see what I have to do every day. So those are the uses of the three computers there, there are other computers out there, right? There’s open claw. I’ve heard rumors that chat GPTs computer is right around the corner.
[00:16:28] all of these are gonna have computers. I have. I’m using all of them because I like to test them all, and some are doing tasks that other ones can be doing. So if you just wanna use one, which I know the sub gets expensive, if you wanted to just use one, you could pick the one that works best for you.
[00:16:43] Claude Cowork is doing a great job. The perplexity computer’s doing a great job. The only downside is I can’t go in and communicate with it when I’m not at my computer. I have to talk to it through my computer right now. I’m sure that’ll change actually, that may not be true. I think that, I think I saw something that that’s not true, that that’s changing too.
[00:17:02] So all of these I think I can talk to through my phone when I’m off doing other things, and as long as it’s not in sleep mode, it can go do this for you. I operate all of this for you. I’ve given it permission to log into all of my major places. Obviously nothing with PHI, you never wanna do this with any PHI stuff.
[00:17:21] But everything else, social media for example, in Clickup. I told Claude Cowork that when my social media team puts a new task and Clickup, I wanted to scan it a couple times a day and look for new tasks. I wanted to, based on the skill that I created for viral content, I wanted to take their idea in clickup,
[00:17:42] pull it into Claude. Use the skill for viral co viral content creation that I created, and then give me a script or an idea or a way that I need to film whatever it is that they’re asking me to do, and then put it in a comprehensive report for me so I can just go in and say, Hey, what do I need to do today?
[00:18:00] You know, just do, do, what do I need to do? And it gives me a very well written script. You know, explaining whatever it is I’m talking about on that reel, and then I can just go like, have it like just remotely. I can just pull it up. I can look it on my phone. If I’m walking on the beach, I’m like, oh, I really should be recording a reel about life as a digital nomad or whatever.
[00:18:17] It and just do it right there. ’cause it’s all like organized for me. Previously, I would’ve been like, okay, I gotta go look and click up. I’ve gotta go find it. I don’t even know where the stupid calendar is. What is it? I’ve gotta open up the job that I’m supposed to do. Look for it, all this copy paste, put it in cla, say write a script for me.
[00:18:37] You don’t have to do that anymore. It’s totally all automated for you. So this is. All new within the last four months, I would say these computers have really gotten very good and I would say a year from now, these computers are gonna be running our lives except for the PHI part. Except for, and I said this before, the perplexity comet.
[00:18:58] Browser that I’m using right now where the computer is living is HIPAA compliant and SOC two level security. So I feel like it’s probably fine if I wanted to use PHI, but I’m not doing it, so I’m just not sure. And that reminds me on May 5th, we, I’m having a free webinar. This is total segue here. I’m having a free webinar with a therapist and HIPAA compliance expert, and we’re gonna be talking about questions like this.
[00:19:24] Like if my com perplexity computer says it’s HIPAA compliant, can I use it and access PHI with my computer? Is it safe to do that? She’s gonna be answering all those questions. You probably hear me talk more about it before then. Her name’s Samantha Shock. And you’ll be hearing more about if you’re on my email list or my Facebook groups, you’ll see me posting about it.
[00:19:44] But I’m excited about that one ’cause these questions are coming up more and more like, can I actually use this and be on the same computer where I’ve got PHI? She’s gonna be answering those questions for you. So I’m excited about that. It comes up all the time in the clinical AI club. Anyway, that’s my excited episode for today and just kind of how I’m using these computers.
[00:20:02] If you have questions, as always, reach out to me and I will answer your questions. Go try it. It’s life changing, like it’s saving so much time and really honestly, I’d be paying a VA to do a lot of this stuff, and you don’t have to anymore. You just pay like whatever tier of level of usage that you’re using and it does it for you mostly.
[00:20:23] I still have to give oversight to my va, you know? Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I’m a micromanager. She probably would say that. But I still give oversight even to my online business manager. I’m giving oversight. So with these, it’s just like another employee that you program to do things for you that you’d normally have to do yourself or be paying someone to do for you.
[00:20:41] So let me know what you think. Talk to you later. Bye.