Brave Leo (Bring Your Own Model)

Brave Leo is an AI assistant built into the Brave browser, with Bring Your Own Model support for people who want to use their own local or remote models while browsing. It can work with third-party APIs as well as Brave's hosted model choices. The browser runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS.

The appeal is access to the material you're already reading. Leo can summarize webpages, analyze PDFs, and answer questions about Google Docs and Google Sheets without making you switch to a separate chat app. It also translates text, drafts articles and emails, and suggests code or database queries. For browsing tasks, it can find tabs related to a topic and gather them into a new window.

Where processing happens depends on the model you choose. BYOM lets you connect to models running locally or remotely; Brave's hosted service sends your prompt, conversation context, and relevant page content to the servers that answer it. Hosted choices include Mixtral, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's Llama. Leo also uses Brave Search for answers that need current information.

Chat history stays on your device. You can revisit saved conversations, or use temporary chats that disappear when closed. Leo can remember preferences across chats, and Brave says it doesn't retain conversations on its servers or use them for model training.

No account is required for the basic Leo experience. Brave is an open-source browser licensed under Mozilla Public License 2.0. On iOS, Leo supports voice-to-text questions.