(Credit: Brave)
The latest version of the Brave browser includes a free-to-use AI chatbot called Leo.
Leo was first introduced for testing three months ago as part of the Nightly channel builds of the browser. However, with the release of Brave 1.60, all desktop users can take advantage of Leo because it's now a standard feature.
Brave Leo offers a range of helpful services such as offering real-time summaries of web pages and videos, translation of pages, helping you to solve problems, and of course, you can simply ask Leo questions.
The AI assistant performs these tasks this while respecting your privacy by directing all requests through an anonymized server, immediately discarding responses so conversations are not persisted, and there's no login or account required to use Leo.
(Credit: Brave)As Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave, explains:
"It is increasingly common today to use AI to ask questions and get assistance. AI can be a powerful tool but it can also present growing concerns for data privacy and there’s a need for a privacy-first solution ... Brave is committed to pairing AI with user privacy, and will provide our users with secure and personalized AI assistance where they already spend their time online."
For those who want more functionality, there's Leo Premium which costs $15 per month. In return for your money, Brave offers access to additional large language models and Anthropic's Claude Instant, which is described as a "lighter model that excels at logical reasoning and coding."
Subscribers are also promised "higher rate limits, higher-quality conversations, priority queuing during periods of peak usage, and early access to new features and improvements." And anyone concerned that a subscription lowers the privacy safeguards can relax as Brave uses unlinkable tokens so your usage can never be linked to your subscription purchase.
Anthropic has recently received billions of investment from both Google and Amazon for its "helpful, honest, and harmless" approach to generative AI. Brave has also been busy updating other areas of its browsing experience, with the most prominent recently being the removal of Bing as a parnter for generating search results.