rewrite this title Lumo, Proton’s privacy-focused AI chatbot, gets an upgrade | TechCrunch

Proton, the privacy-focused productivity app company, released a public AI chatbot, Lumo, last year. On Tuesday, the chatbot received an upgrade.

Lumo 2.0 gives the chatbot a variety of newfound powers including image recognition and image generation capabilities. Users can now upload pictures into Lumo, then use the chatbot to analyze or edit them. Similar to other LLMs, Lumo can also generate imagery based on a user’s prompt.

2.0 also expands Lumo’s capabilities for Projects — the widget that allows users to upload documents and conduct work via Proton’s other products like email, cloud storage. Projects now come with user-controlled persistent memory, which is a function that allows Lumo to recall a user’s preferences across various conversational sessions.

Additionally, the company says Lumo’s update makes it significantly more powerful than its previous version. The 2.0 version responds to most queries up to 76 percent faster than its previous iteration, the company says. The chatbot also comes with a new “thinking mode” for more complex problems or questions.

“Lumo 2.0 has been re-engineered from the ground up and the introduction of thinking mode gives it powerful new capabilities,” said Andy Yen, Founder and CEO at Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections.”

The public version of Lumo appears roughly equivalent to other major chatbots in terms of usefulness. It answers questions in a similar format as Gemini and ChatGPT, with approximately the same level of detail and context.

Yet, Proton distinguishes Lumo from other chatbot providers with its privacy protections. It uses what it calls zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts users data in transit and at rest, only allowing access to the user. The company also claims that no server-side logging of sessions is retained, so nobody at Proton can see the contents of conversations. Proton also promises to never use customer data for AI training or share it with third-parties.

Lumo 2.0 is available immediately. In addition to the free public version, Proton offers paid tiers (Plus and Professional) that give those users significantly more access and resources.