Proton announces privacy-friendly AI chatbot Lumo
Proton, a technology company from Switzerland focused on online services, has launched a privacy-friendly AI chatbot called Lumo.
According to the company, AI has the power to make big changes for businesses and people. However, the past has shown us that AI can also be used for other purposes, including data harvesting, online advertising, and data exploitation.
“AI is here to stay, but the current iterations of AI reflect a failure to learn from the past,” Proton states in its most recent blog post.
For that reason, Proton decided to build Lumo, a private AI assistant that makes sure your privacy is secured and guaranteed.
How does Lumo protect your privacy? In several ways.
For starters, Proton doesn’t keep a record of your logs on its servers. Instead, your conversations with Lumo are stored locally on your devices.
Secondly, chat conversations are encrypted with so-called zero-access encryption, meaning that neither Proton nor other third-parties can read your chats. It also means that Proton can’t share data with other companies, because it has no data to share.
Lastly, unlike other AI companies, user conversations or other inputs aren’t used to train large language models (LLMs). Instead, Lumo is based upon open-source language models and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. “This gives you much greater transparency into the way Lumo works than any other major AI assistant,” the company claims.
Lumo can be used to search the internet for information, upload files, summarize documents, and write code and emails.
Lumo is available for free via Proton’s website, or its apps for Android and iOS. You don’t need to be a registered user with a Proton account to use the AI chatbot.
There will also be a paid Lumo Plus version, which will cost €12.99 for a monthly plan, or €9.99 for a 12-month plan. It offers unlimited chats, extended chat history, unlimited chat favorites, and the option to upload multiple files and larger files.
Lumo currently supports chats in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.