Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot gets a productivity push with new ‘deep research’ mode

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.