
Brave's AI assistant Leo has been upgraded to interact with PDFs and Google Drive files
Brave has just revealed that its AI assistant, Leo, has been upgraded to interact with PDFs and Google Drive files. This integration with popular productivity apps and document types is designed to enhance user efficiency in both academic and professional settings, while maintaining privacy.
Leo's interaction with PDFs is facilitated by the use of the accessibility tree in the document's metadata. This allows the AI to comprehend the semantic structure underlying the PDF documents. In addition, Leo employs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on canvas-rendered apps, which enables it to extract text from images of pages in Google Docs and Google Sheets.
Leo's expanded capabilities mean it can provide insights and suggestions across a wide range of productivity applications, assisting with multiple important use cases. The innovative application of the accessibility tree and OCR, among other techniques, are key to this functionality.
Brave has made Leo's support for PDFs, Google Docs, and Google Sheets accessible to all Brave desktop users operating on version 1.63 or higher. This version, released just yesterday, also introduces the option to position vertical tabs on the right side of the window, among several other enhancements and bug fixes.
I'm enjoying Leo as a compliment to web browsing. It's nice to just do a quick lookup of something, quick summary, quick translation, etc. Not sure it integrating with Google is useful when Gemini will do that more natively with GDocs but we'll see. I didn't like Leo at first but it grew on me.