The French artificial intelligence company Mistral has announced a significant update for its chatbot, Le Chat, introducing a range of new features aimed at enhancing productivity for both individual and enterprise users. The update brings Le Chat closer in capability to competing services from companies like OpenAI and Google.
A key new feature is the “deep research” mode. According to Mistral, this function allows the chatbot to act as a research assistant that can plan, search across a wide variety of web sources, and synthesize the gathered information to provide comprehensive answers to complex questions. The company stated this is relevant for tasks like planning travel or conducting exhaustive research for business purposes.
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Mistral’s head of product, Elisa Salamanca, highlighted the company’s focus on enterprise clients, particularly those in sectors with sensitive data like banking and defense. A major differentiator, according to Salamanca, is Le Chat’s ability to connect to a company’s data on-premises. This means businesses can use the AI to analyze internal data without uploading it to external cloud services, a contrast to cloud-hosted platforms from competitors.
Additional new capabilities
The update also includes several other improvements:
- Multilingual Reasoning: Le Chat now natively supports complex reasoning in multiple languages, including French, Spanish, and Japanese, and can switch between them within a single conversation.
- Image Editing: Users can now edit images using simple text prompts, such as instructing the AI to remove an object from a picture.
- Projects: A new organizational feature allows users to group related chats, documents, and ideas into dedicated project spaces.
- Voxtral Integration: Mistral’s recently released open-source audio model, Voxtral, is now integrated into Le Chat, enabling functions like transcription and audio-based reasoning.
These updates are available across all of Le Chat’s service tiers, from the free version to the enterprise plan. The company also stated its goal is to make office software like Microsoft Excel and Google Docs work seamlessly with Le Chat’s capabilities in a business context.
