Proton, the company behind a suite of privacy-focused productivity applications, first introduced its public AI chatbot, Lumo, last year. Now, the chatbot has received a significant update. With the release of Lumo 2.0, the tool gains a range of new capabilities, including both image recognition and image generation. Users can now upload pictures into Lumo and then ask the chatbot to analyze or edit them. Much like other large language models, Lumo can also create images from scratch based on a user’s text prompt.

The 2.0 upgrade also expands Lumo’s functionality for Projects—the feature that lets users upload documents and work across Proton’s other services, such as email and cloud storage. Projects now include user-controlled persistent memory, which allows Lumo to recall a user’s preferences across different conversation sessions. According to the company, this update makes Lumo significantly more powerful than its predecessor. Specifically, the 2.0 version responds to most queries up to 76 percent faster than before. The chatbot also introduces a new “thinking mode” designed to handle 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 of Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections.”

In terms of general usefulness, the public version of Lumo appears roughly on par with other major chatbots. It answers questions in a format similar to Gemini and ChatGPT, offering about the same level of detail and context. However, Proton differentiates Lumo from other chatbot providers through its privacy protections. The service uses what it calls zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts user data both in transit and at rest, allowing only the user to access it. The company also claims that no server-side logging of sessions is retained, meaning no one at Proton can view the contents of conversations. Furthermore, Proton promises it will 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 provide significantly more access and resources to subscribers.