Mistral's Le Chat Chatbot Unveils Major Upgrades to Rival Industry Giants

Mistral's Le Chat chatbot gets a productivity push with new 'deep research' mode | TechCrunch

French AI lab Mistral introduced a range of new features to its Le Chat chatbot on Thursday that bring it closer to the capabilities of rivals like OpenAI and Google. The new update includes a new "deep research" mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. The news comes a couple of days after Mistral released Voxtral, its first open source AI audio model that's capable of reasoning in multiple languages, transcription, and more. Voxtral is also available via Le Chat. Mistral says its new deep research mode, like those offered by rivals, turns Le Chat into a coordinated research assistant that can plan, clarify your needs, search, and synthesize data. "What the model does is really go and look into a big variety of sources on the web to answer a specific question," Mistral's head of product, Elisa Salamanca, told TechCrunch. "We believe this feature is going to be very relevant for both consumer and enterprise use cases. For consumers, because it can research travel and provide an exhaustive analysis of the best travel plans. And for enterprise work, it can do exhaustive research." While the updates are available across all tiers - Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise - Salamanca notes that Mistral is focusing on integrating Le Chat and Mistral's productivity suite into enterprise ecosystems with this release. That's in large part because Mistral handles data connectors differently than competitors. "A lot of customers who have very sensitive data don't actually use cloud services, or if they do, they do it on their own premises with virtual private clouds," Salamanca said, citing customers in banking, defense, and government. To address this, Salamanca said Mistral's Le Chat and productivity suite connect to enterprise data on-premises. In other words, companies can use Le Chat's deep reasoning and other capabilities to analyze their own internal data without having to upload anything to the cloud. That's a meaningful differentiator against cloud-native LLM platforms like OpenAI, which is Azure-hosted, and Gemini, which is Google Cloud-based. It also opens the door for Mistral to offer other productivity tools. "A big part of our value proposition, especially when we release Le Chat Enterprise, is that we want to make [things like] Microsoft Excel and Google Docs and that kind of office suite work seamlessly with our capabilities," Salamanca said. "So the connectors that we release with Le Chat Enterprise are actually one step in that direction. We're building these connectors internally because we believe this is going to be a key for using Le Chat as a productivity enabler in the business context." Aside from deep reasoning, Le Chat has gotten other updates today. While users have been able to use Le Chat to reason through complex questions via Magistral, Mistral's new reasoning AI model, that capability was previously only available in English. Now, Mistral natively supports multilingual reasoning in languages like French, Spanish, Japanese, and others. Mistral says Le Chat can also code-switch between languages mid-sentence. This latest update from Mistral also includes the addition of Projects, which helps users stay organized by grouping chats, documents, and ideas into focused spaces. Each project can have its own default library and remember which tools and settings a user has enabled. Mistral says use cases include planning a move, designing a new product feature, or keeping work-related projects on track. Finally, Le Chat is getting improved image editing capabilities. This allows users to create and edit images with prompts like "remove the object" or "place me in another city." The new features put Mistral in a more competitive range with the AI industry's frontrunners, positioning Le Chat as more than just a model demo, but a full-stack contender.

France's Mistral adds new AI features to rival US chatbots

PARIS, July 17 (Reuters) - French start-up Mistral announced new features to its AI chatbot Le Chat on Thursday as it tries to carve out a place for itself in a global AI race dominated by the United States and China. Often presented as France's and Europe's AI champion, Mistral competes with American giants such as OpenAI and Alphabet's Google, but lags behind in terms of market share or revenues. "We're making Le Chat even more capable, more intuitive -- and more fun -- with a collection of powerful new features to help you research more thoroughly, express yourself more naturally, and keep your interactions -- text, voice, and images -- organized in context", said Mistral in a blog post. While Europe's AI champion Mistral's chatbot has been lagging in some advanced features offered by bigger American rivals such as OpenAI and Google, the latest update brings it closer to the options available in the market. Among the new features accessible to anyone using Le Chat, users can talk to Mistral's AI generative model instead of typing through its "Voxtral" model. It can also be used as a research assistant gathering "credible sources" with a "Deep Research" mode. AI models have all been struggling to sort fake news from authentic information. Valued at $6.2 billion by venture capitalists and feted by French President Emmanuel Macron, Mistral gained global exposure at an international AI gathering in Paris in February. Mistral - which formed partnerships with several top French companies such as TotalEnergies, CMA CGM or Orange - is intent on developing its corporate clientele and implementing its models on-premises. Reporting by Florence Loeve Editing by Ros Russell Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Mistral's Le Chat adds deep research agent and voice mode to challenge OpenAI's enterprise dominance

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Since OpenAI introduced Deep Research, an AI agent that can conduct research for users and generate a comprehensive report, many other companies have released their own versions of this capability, all named Deep Research. Deep Research, as a feature and product, can be accessed through various platforms, including Google's Gemini, AlphaSense, You.com, DeepSeek, Grok 3 and many others. Now, French company Mistral joins the fray with the launch of deep research capabilities into its Le Chat, among other updates to the platform. In a blog post, the company said Deep Research and other new features will make Le Chat "even more capable, more intuitive and more fun." Le Chat users can open research mode and ask it something. The chatbot then asks questions to clarify some information and then begins gathering sources. It will put together "a structured, reference-backed report that's easy to follow." Mistral said its research is powered by a Deep Research agent, which it designed to be "genuinely helpful" and feels like working with an organized research partner. Deep Research has been called "the first mass market AI that could displace jobs," especially since it can put out reports faster than human analysts. Mistral also updated "thinking mode," where Le Chat users can access the company's chain-of-thought model Magistral, to read and respond in different languages. It can also code-switch mid-sentence. Prompt-based image editing and other features For people creating images on the chat app, they can ask the chatbot to edit parts of the photo with just a prompt. Users can say something like "generate a drawing of a cat," then ask Le Chat to "place him in Istanbul," and it will do just that. "It's ideal for making consistent edits across a series, keeping people, objects, and design elements recognizable from one image to the next," Mistral said. Thanks to the recently released speech recognition model, Voxtral, Le Chat can now support voice mode, where users can chat out loud with the platform. The company said this mode is best for low-latency speech recognition and keeping up with someone's conversational pace. Le Chat's new Projects feature allows users to organize related conversations and topics into groups. The projects will utilize their own libraries -- which can include uploaded files -- and retain tools and preferred settings. This is similar to Google's NotebookLM. Playing catch-up Many of the new features on Le Chat may seem familiar. It's normal for other chat platforms to introduce similar features, especially as people begin to expect these capabilities when using chat systems. For example, both Gemini and ChatGPT allow users to edit generated photos using a prompt. Sometimes, the chatbots misunderstand and redo the entire image. However, I recently generated and edited a photo with ChatGPT, and the chatbot removed exactly what I wanted it to. Voice mode has been available on ChatGPT since September 2024, though ChatGPT always included a "Read Aloud" feature. Project Astra from Google took voice mode to a new level, demonstrating in a demo that users can point out something in the physical world to Gemini and ask it to describe it out loud. However, Mistral has the advantage of being Europe-based and can bring features directly to the European market. Companies like OpenAI often struggle to bring certain services, such as ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, to Europe due to data regulations and some provisions of the European Union's AI Act. Despite this, users seemed excited that Mistral brought many new powerful features to Le Chat, with some early users seeing strong performance from Mistral's Deep Research.

Mistral AI brings deep research to Le Chat, alongside image editing, voice mode and more - SiliconANGLE

Mistral AI brings deep research to Le Chat, alongside image editing, voice mode and more French generative artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI SAS today announced multiple updates for Le Chat, the company's AI chatbot assistant, including a deep research capability, image editing, voice mode, projects and advanced image editing. Le Chat is Mistral's competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google LLC's Gemini, Anthropic PBC's Claude and other AI assistants on the market and this is the first time the company has unleashed a Deep Research Mode. Similar to other AI chatbots with deep research capabilities, this mode turns Le Chat into a coordinated research assistant that can plan, clarify needs and synthesize sources into a structured reference-backed report that a user can easily follow. According to Mistral, the new mode is powered by a tool-augmented Deep Research agent that provides transparency and helpful collaboration as a partner. The company said it can assist with researching anything from market trends, business strategy or scientific research. Of course, if a user wants to use it for something closer to home, they could also just ask it to assist with personal planning, travel or shopping. Mistral recently released its Voxtral model, which is an open-source, state-of-the-art speech understanding AI model available in two sizes: 24 billion parameters for production and 8 billion parameters for local deployment. This enables the company's newest voice mode update, which allows users to talk to Le Chat just like a person, no typing needed. Users can now brainstorm ideas, get quick answers and transcribe meetings, all without typing. Thinking mode, which allows AI to reason through complex questions by breaking them down into step-by-step thoughts, powered by the company's reasoning model series Magistral, now comes in multilingual mode. This means that users can ask for complex concepts or reasoning in different languages or write prompts in separate languages such as English and French, or Japanese and Spanish. Projects help users keep groups of chats and files together in one context-rich space so that they can stay organized. Each project has its own default Library that remembers which tools and settings are enabled, so that things remain unchanged when a user leaves that space. Users may also upload files that will be referenced; the assistant will pull content from the Library and keep everything -- including chats, documents and ideas -- in one place. This is perfect for when a user wants to separate different lines of thinking across chats, but wants to retain thought context between them. Mistral has also added a new image tool to its retinue that allows users to create and then edit images with simple prompts such as "remove this object" or "place this in another city" (such as this Mistral AI-generated cat) and the model transforms the scene while preserving characters and other details. The company said this is ideal for making consistent edits across a series, keeping people, objects and other compositional elements recognizable from one image to the next.