Lumo, the privacy-focused chatbot from Proton, is getting an upgrade

Launched by Proton, a privacy-focused productivity app company 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 creation capabilities. Users can now upload images to Lumo, then use a chatbot to analyze or edit them. Similar to other LLM software, Lumo can also generate images based on user prompt.

Version 2.0 also expands the capabilities of Lumo for Projects – a tool that allows users to upload documents and conduct work across other Proton products such as email and cloud storage. Projects now comes with user-controlled persistent memory, a function that allows Lumo to remember user preferences across different chat sessions.

In addition, the company says that the Lumo update makes it much more powerful than the previous version. The company says version 2.0 responds to most queries up to 76 percent faster than the previous version. The chatbot also comes with a new “thinking mode” for more complex problems or questions.

“Lumo 2.0 has been redesigned from the ground up, and the introduction of Thinking Mode gives it powerful new capabilities,” said Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protection.”

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

However, Proton sets Lumo apart from other chat software providers with its privacy protection. It uses so-called zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts users’ data in transit and at rest, allowing only user access. The company also claims that no recording of sessions is kept server-side, so no one 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 generic version, Proton offers paid tiers (Plus and Professional) that give these users greater access and resources.