Mistral AI, the French startup behind the Mistral large language models, has finally joined the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek in releasing its own mobile apps. The company's chat platform, the equivalent of ChatGPT, is called Le Chat - it's on the Play Store and App Store if you're interested in downloading it.
Based on Neowin's testing, the app is very usable, but not quite as polished as ChatGPT. It can provide answers with the latest data thanks to internet access, and you can upload PDFs and images for it to look at. Le Chat also has a canvas feature, a code interpreter, and can generate images.
Each of the components, such as web access, seem to have their own independent limits. After just a few searches, Le Chat's bot responded, saying it couldn't get the up-to-date information because the web search limit had been hit. This is quite unique, usually, you'd just run out of messages on other bots, like Anthropic's Claude.
While the introduction of mobile apps is good, people that use Le Chat already may be a bit peeved off by today's updates. The service was totally free before today, but now there are usage limits, unless you pay.
Currently, there are the Free, Pro, Team, and Student (scroll to the bottom of the upgrade page) tiers. The Pro tier is what most people will upgrade to, and it costs $14.99 per month, which is quite competitive with ChatGPT and Gemini. This is cheaper than both of its American counterparts. You get unlimited messages and web searches (subject to fair use) and extended access to stuff like image generation and file uploads.
One troubling aspect of Le Chat is that free users cannot opt out of having their data used to train models. Instead, you have to become a Pro user to opt out. Given all the regulations in the European Union, you'd expect the option to opt out to be available to everyone - it's an option on ChatGPT and Perplexity for free users.
You can find the download links and loads of example videos in Mistral AI's announcement.
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