Proton Upgrades Lumo AI Chatbot With New Privacy and Smart Features

Privacy-focused productivity company Proton has rolled out a major update to its public AI chatbot, Lumo, which originally launched last year. On Tuesday, the company introduced Lumo 2.0, bringing several new capabilities designed to make the chatbot more powerful while maintaining Proton’s emphasis on user privacy.

The latest version adds a range of new features, including image recognition and AI-powered image generation. Users can now upload photos into Lumo and ask the chatbot to analyse, interpret, or edit them. Like other leading large language models, Lumo can generate images from user-provided text prompts.

Lumo 2.0 also significantly enhances the chatbot’s Projects feature, the workspace that allows users to upload documents and work across Proton services such as email and cloud storage. Projects now include user-controlled persistent memory, enabling Lumo to remember individual preferences across multiple conversations while leaving users in control of what information is retained.

In addition to the new functionality, Proton says the latest release delivers a substantial performance improvement over the previous version. According to the company, Lumo 2.0 responds to most requests up to 76% faster than before. The chatbot also introduces a new “thinking mode,” designed to tackle more complex questions and reasoning tasks with greater depth.

“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 of Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections.”

In terms of everyday functionality, the public version of Lumo offers an experience comparable to other leading AI chatbots. It answers questions in a format similar to services such as Gemini and ChatGPT, providing comparable levels of context, explanation, and detail across a wide range of topics.

Where Proton aims to differentiate itself from Lumo is through its privacy-first approach. The company says the chatbot is built on its zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts user data both in transit and at rest, ensuring that only the user can access the information. Proton also states that conversations are not retained through server-side logging, meaning even Proton employees cannot view users’ chat histories. In addition, the company says customer data is never used to train AI models or shared with third parties.

Lumo 2.0 is available immediately. Alongside the free public version, Proton also offers paid Plus and Professional subscription plans that provide users with expanded usage limits, additional resources, and access to more advanced capabilities.