Mistral's AI chatbot comes to iOS and Android – here's why you should try it

A little-known French startup company is attempting to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot with its own AI chatbot. Known as Le Chat, Mistral’s AI service has already been accessible as a website and is now aiming to make a splash with its new mobile apps.

Launched in April 2023, Mistral AI is a French artificial intelligence startup. Co-founded by former Meta employees Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample and former DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch, Mistral has developed and released several large language models (LLMs), both commercial and open source. Mistral’s LLMs are accessible not only through websites and mobile apps but via APIs for third-party applications.

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The Le Chat website works similarly to other AI sites. Beyond submitting your text-based questions and requests, you can upload a PDF or image file for analysis, tell it to generate an image, and ask it to interpret your code. Taking a page from ChatGPT, Le Chat can also work as a standard search engine.

But there’s more. A Canvas feature helps you create documents, presentations, code, mockups, and other content. You can modify and then preview the content directly in place without having to submit new requests. Soon you’ll also be able to use AI-powered agents to carry out your requested tasks on their own.

The basic version of Le Chat is free to use, with or without an account, however, paid plans are also in the mix. At $15 a month, a Pro subscription grants you unlimited access to Mistral’s highest-performing models, an unlimited number of requests per day, and the ability to opt out of sharing your data. Starting at $25 per user per month, a Team plan designed for two or more people adds central management and dedicated support.

To supplement the website, Mistral launched a mobile Le Chat app this week. Designed for iPhone, iPad, and Android users, the app is simply and cleanly designed but still allows you to generate images, analyze your photos, and access a history of your previous chats.

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What makes Le Chat so special that it’s worth using, either on the web or on your mobile device? In a news post from last November, Mistral touted several new powers.

The web search provides sources and citations so you can confirm the results. The Canvas tool is ideal for in-line editing and creating. Le Chat’s analysis of documents and images that you upload is powered by Mistral’s multimodal Pixtral Large, an LLM that at the time outperformed Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Gemini-1.5 Pro, and GPT-4o. The image generation is powered by Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro for faster speed and efficiency over previous versions and rival generators.

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Mistral claims that its open-source Le Chat assistant is powered by the world’s fastest inference engines, capable of responding to your prompts with up to 1,000 words per second, says TechCrunch, which found it faster than ChatGPT’s 4o model.

With ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and now DeepSeek popular among PC and mobile users, Mistral has its work cut out if it wants to compete with the major players. But with time and even more innovations, Le Chat may eke out its own top spot in the AI arena.