Brave Leo Integrates with PDF and Google Drive Files

Brave announced that Leo, its privacy-focused, browser-based AI assistant, now integrates with PDF and Google Drive files.

“By seamlessly integrating with these popular productivity apps and document types, Leo enables users to save time and accomplish more at school and work, while preserving user privacy,” Brave’s announcement post explains. “In both cases, Leo can offer insights and suggestions for users working with many different productivity applications, whether at school or at work.”

With this update, Brave Leo can extract data and topics from PDF files, propose terms and writing styles in Google Docs, analyze tables and data and suggest tables in Google Sheets, highlight key discussion points in Slack workplace threads, and provide video transcripts from classes, industry events, and other videos.

These capabilities will sound familiar to anyone following this year’s AI advances, but because Brave is focused so innately on privacy, Leo uses a variety of techniques to protect user data and anonymity. Among other things, Leo doesn’t persist conversations on Brave’s servers, discards responses after they’re generated, and doesn’t use conversations for training. Brave doesn’t collect any identifiers that can be linked to users, doesn’t retain any personal data, and doesn’t require—or even offer—an account for access. Even if you sign up for Leo Premium, Brave issues you unlinkable tokens that validate your subscription.

Brave notes that Leo will soon support other file types as well, plus integration with GitHub for code reviews and summaries.

“From the beginning, we saw Leo as far more than an AI chatbot (though it can handle real-time, contextual chats with ease),” the company notes. “Rather, we saw Leo as a true smart assistant that could help you engage with the applications you use every day, to help you learn, work, and plan more efficiently. By surfacing insights from within PDFs, suggesting text for Google Docs, writing formulas for Google Sheets, summarizing YouTube videos, analyzing code in GitHub (and more), Leo saves you time and makes you more efficient and productive.”

Leo’s support for PDFs, Google Docs, and Google Sheets is available now for all users of Brave desktop version 1.63 or higher. To experience this, just open a PDF, Google Doc, or Google Sheet in the Brave browser, click the Leo icon in the sidebar, and ask it questions about the file.