Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The company behind Proton Mail and ProtonVPN has announced a new privacy-focused AI chatbot, called “Lumo.”
- Chats with Lumo are claimed to be end-to-end encrypted and stored directly on your devices.
- It offers both free and paid tiers and is available on Android and iOS devices, as well as with a web interface.
Proton, known for its eponymous VPN and mail client apps, is joining the rally of companies that have embraced artificial intelligence or AI. Earlier today, Proton announced its entry into the AI chatbot market, positioning itself against stalwarts like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, but with a different approach.
Proton has claimed its Lumo AI chatbot abides by the same privacy code as the rest of its products. It states that the chatbot does not store any chats, which remain encrypted and are therefore only accessible on your devices. Queries to Lumo go through Proton’s data centers in Europe and are immune to disclosure demands by law enforcement agencies in countries like the US.
You can use the chatbot even without signing up for or logging into your existing Proton account. However, logging in will enable a history of your chats. But even then, these chats are stored locally on your device and do not sync across multiple devices.
Proton says its privacy-first approach ensures that data is never used to train or refine AI models. It doesn’t reveal the encryption standard but compares Lumo with other services, such as Proton Mail, which use OpenPGP with AES-256 or ChaCha20 for end-to-end network encryption. There is no information available about the underlying language models either, but the company says it utilizes open-source AI models built in Europe. It further denies any association with OpenAI or any American or Chinese AI company.
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
Like other chatbots, Lumo can process text and voice-generated queries, source results directly from the web, write code, and summarize text-based file types such as PDF and DOC as input. However, it currently cannot handle media files, such as images or videos, meaning it can neither use them to augment input nor generate them.
Proton Lumo is free to use, but the unpaid tier comes with restrictions, such as slower processing, daily limits, and caps on file size. There is another paid tier, called Lumo Plus, which unlocks unlimited chats, a longer chat history, and support for multiple uploads per query for €9.99 (~$11.70).
Lumo is available on mobile for both Android and iOS, as well as through a web interface.
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