French AI tools you’ve never heard of: Noota, Moshi, Vibe…

When people talk about AI, three or four American names take up all the oxygen. Yet some of the most useful tools for your studies are built in France, and many have a free tier. Here are the ones worth your time in September 2026: what they do, what they cost, where your data goes, and what you can actually use them for.

In short: on the French side, the most useful tools for students are Vibe (the new name of Mistral’s Le Chat, with a student price), Compar:IA (the French government’s free, no-account model comparison site), Noota for meeting notes, Kyutai’s open voice models (Moshi, Unmute, Hibiki-Zero) and the Luciole models you can run on your own laptop. Elsewhere in Europe, DeepL, FLUX.2 [klein] and Proton’s Lumo round out the toolbox. Albert, the French state’s AI, is reserved for public servants. And “French” does not mean “private by default.”

Three questions to ask before adopting a tool

1. Is the free tier enough for what you need?
2. Where is your data stored? “Hosted in the EU” doesn’t guarantee nothing ever leaves the EU.
3. Are your conversations used to train models, and how do you opt out?

Vibe (formerly Le Chat), Mistral’s assistant

If you’re looking for Le Chat and can’t find it, that’s why: in late May 2026, at its AI Now Summit, Mistral renamed its assistant Vibe. Your account, plan and conversations carry over, at the same address, chat.mistral.ai, according to Mistral’s help center. There are three modes: Chat (the classic conversation), Work (multi-step tasks across your apps) and Code (for programming).

• Free: web and mobile access, the latest models, limited messages and web searches, image generation (pricing page).
• Pro: $14.99 a month before tax on the pricing page, or €17.99 a month according to heise.
• Student deal: “Verified students can get Mistral Pro for $5.99 / month,” says Mistral, for up to 12 months, for verified students at accredited higher-education institutions who have never used Vibe or Le Chat.
• Data: hosted in the European Union by default, but some features can involve temporary transfers outside the EU to subprocessors (Mistral). More importantly, on the standard plans your conversations are used to train models by default unless you opt out in settings. And giving a thumbs up or down lets Mistral use that rated exchange even if you opted out (Mistral).

Student use case: paste your thermodynamics notes, ask for a ten-question quiz, answer without looking, then ask for a correction that explains each mistake. Turn off training first.

Compar:IA, the public model arena open to everyone

Compar:IA has you chat blind with two AIs; you vote for the better answer, then see which models they were. It also shows the environmental impact of each exchange. Launched in October 2024 by the French Ministry of Culture’s digital lab, it is free and requires no account. In early September 2026, the site added an optional account that keeps your history, and model cards that show an energy class from A to F (Archimag). The interface is in French, which also makes it good practice if you study the language.

Data warning: questions and votes are published as open datasets after anonymization. Never type anything personal.

Student use case: before picking the assistant that will help you revise Spanish, ask two models the same question about the subjunctive and compare the explanations.

Kyutai: open-source voice AI (Moshi, Unmute, Hibiki-Zero)

Kyutai is a nonprofit research lab announced in November 2023 with a budget of around €300 million, funded notably by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé and Eric Schmidt’s foundation (TechCrunch).

• Moshi, unveiled on July 3, 2024, is a voice AI that listens and speaks at the same time, and can interrupt or be interrupted (Maddyness).
• Unmute (May 2025) makes any text model listen and speak, with responses in under a second. The demo is free at unmute.sh and the code is open (Kyutai).
• Hibiki-Zero (February 2026) translates French, Spanish, Portuguese and German into English in real time. MIT-licensed code, NVIDIA GPU with at least 8 GB (GitHub).
• The 1-billion-parameter speech-to-text model handles English and French and runs on a Mac, even an iPhone (GitHub).

Student use case: language students can practice a fluid spoken conversation with the Unmute demo (without sharing anything personal). Engineering students get a solid, locally runnable base for a speech-processing project.

Noota, for project meetings

Noota records, transcribes and summarizes your meetings. The startup, co-founded by Alexandre Duffaut and Darius Al Naddaf, raised €3 million in May 2025.

• Free: 300 minutes a month, one month of storage, custom summaries, Chrome extension and mobile apps (pricing).
• Pro: $29 a month billed monthly, $19 a month billed yearly. No student deal listed.
• Data: stored on Google Cloud in European data centers (France, Belgium, the Netherlands). According to the company, it isn’t used to train its models (Noota).

Student use case: your group project’s weekly meeting automatically turns into minutes and a task list. Get everyone’s consent before recording, and the instructor’s for a lecture.

If you code, Gladia is a transcription API (100+ languages, EU hosting, a contractual no-training-on-your-audio commitment) with €50 in one-time free credits (pricing).

Lucie, then Luciole: the honest story of the “sovereign” model

Lucie is the open model of the OpenLLM-France consortium, led by the software company Linagora: 6.7 billion parameters, weights released under Apache 2.0 (LeMagIT). Its launch went badly. The lucie.chat chatbot opened on Thursday, January 23, 2025, and was suspended by Saturday the 25th (The Register). In between, screenshots spread: wrong math and even “cow’s eggs” recommended as food. Linagora acknowledged a premature release: Lucie was a raw research model, without in-depth instruction tuning or guardrails (Linagora).

In June 2026, the consortium released Luciole: three models (1, 8 and 23 billion parameters), weights under Apache 2.0, training data under CC-BY-SA 4.0, funded by Bpifrance through France 2030 (Goodtech). The stated goal is no longer a public assistant but building blocks. The model card is candid: the 23B version was post-trained almost entirely on English and can hallucinate (Hugging Face).

Student use case: the 8B version weighs 5 GB and runs with ollama run OpenLLM-France/Luciole-Instruct-1.1:8B (Ollama). In computer science or linguistics, compare its answers with a large model’s: your texts never leave your computer.

In the same open spirit, Pleias publishes datasets such as SYNTH (November 2025), built from Wikipedia to teach small models to reason.

Photoroom, for visuals

Founded in 2019, Photoroom claims more than 150 million downloads and raised $43 million in February 2024 (PR Newswire). The app removes backgrounds and generates new ones for product photos. Free accounts have export limits and are for personal, non-commercial use only (Photoroom).

Data: by default, the images you upload are used to train its models. You can opt out in your account settings, and transfers outside the European Economic Area can happen (privacy policy).

Student use case: in design or marketing, a packaging mockup for a class project. For a real client, you need a paid plan.

HoloTab, the agent that browses for you

H Company, founded in Paris in 2023, raised $220 million in 2024 (Wikipedia). Its consumer product, HoloTab, is a free Chrome extension released in April 2026: you describe a task and the agent clicks and fills in fields in your browser (Hugging Face). On data, screenshots are deleted at most one hour after processing, and prompts go through US-based infrastructure. For European users, they are kept in Europe for up to 30 days (H Company).

Student use case: collecting the application deadlines of ten master’s programs into one table. Keep it away from your student portal and your bank.

For a student society, Dust lets you build shared agents: 500 free lifetime credits, with US or EU hosting.

Albert, the French state’s AI: not for you

The Albert API, built by Etalab within DINUM (the state’s digital agency), is meant for public administrations and runs in a SecNumCloud-certified environment (DINUM). After a trial in 48 France Services centers, the chatbot wasn’t rolled out as is (Next). On June 16, 2026, minister David Amiel announced that the “Assistant IA” would be extended to just over one million state employees, teachers included (Acteurs Publics).

Elsewhere in Europe: DeepL, FLUX.2 [klein], Lumo

DeepL, based in Cologne, translates 50,000 characters a month for free; the Individual plan costs €7.49 a month billed yearly (DeepL). Careful: the free version keeps your texts for a while to train its models and forbids translating personal data (privacy policy). For translation classes, translate it yourself first, then compare with DeepL and analyze the differences.

FLUX.2 [klein], released by Black Forest Labs on January 15, 2026, generates images in under a second. The 4B version is Apache 2.0 and runs on a consumer GPU (around 13 GB of VRAM); the 9B uses a non-commercial license (Black Forest Labs).

Lumo, from Swiss company Proton, works without an account (Proton). Conversations are encrypted, not logged and never used for training, according to Proton, and its servers are in Germany (heise). A European open-source AI index has, however, challenged its “open source” label (Wikipedia).

What about Laguna? Is it French?

No. Laguna is Poolside’s family of coding models, including Laguna XS.2, free and runnable locally (Poolside). Poolside has a Paris branch but is headquartered in San Francisco (Wikipedia), and VentureBeat describes it as American.

Summary table

Tool	Maker	Free	Price or student deal	Data	For you
Vibe (ex-Le Chat)	Mistral (FR)	Yes, limited	Pro $14.99 pre-tax, student $5.99 pre-tax	EU by default, training unless you opt out	Quizzes, explanations
Compar:IA	Ministry of Culture (FR)	Yes, no account	Free	Exchanges published, anonymized	Comparing models
Noota	Noota (FR)	300 min/month	Pro $19 to $29	EU, no training per Noota	Meeting notes
Unmute, Hibiki-Zero	Kyutai (FR)	Yes, open source	Free	Can run locally	Speaking practice, voice projects
Luciole	OpenLLM-France (FR)	Yes, open source	Free	Fully local	Local AI
Photoroom	Photoroom (FR)	Yes, personal use	Paid for commercial use	Training unless you opt out	Visuals
HoloTab	H Company (FR)	Yes	Free	US infrastructure, 30 days in Europe	Web chores
DeepL	DeepL (DE)	50,000 characters/month	€7.49/month	Free tier: training	Translation
FLUX.2 [klein]	Black Forest Labs	Yes (4B)	Free locally	Can run locally	Illustrations
Lumo	Proton (CH)	Yes, no account	Paid Plus tier	Encrypted, servers in Germany	Sensitive questions
Albert	French state	No	Public servants only	SecNumCloud	Not available

Our take: what this changes for you

French tools shine mostly in niches: voice, open models, meeting notes, images. And “French” doesn’t mean “private by default”: Vibe and Photoroom train on your data unless you opt out, while Noota and Lumo say they don’t.

In practice: try Compar:IA to see which models explain your subject best. If you want a subscription, Vibe’s student price is very low, but turn off training as soon as you sign up. For anything sensitive, use a local model like Luciole, or Lumo. And keep the golden rule: AI explains and corrects, it doesn’t write your assignment. Check what your institution allows.

FAQ

Is there a free French alternative to ChatGPT?

Yes. Vibe (formerly Le Chat) has a free tier with limited messages, and Compar:IA lets you chat with several models for free, with no account.

Does Mistral have a student discount?

Yes: Mistral Pro for $5.99 a month before tax instead of $14.99, for up to 12 months. You need to be a verified student at an accredited institution and never have used Vibe or Le Chat.

Does a French AI protect my data better?

Not automatically. EU hosting helps, but several tools train on your conversations by default. Turn off training whenever you can.

Can I use Albert, the French state’s AI?

No. Albert and the Assistant IA are reserved for public administrations and their staff. The state tool open to everyone is Compar:IA.

Which French AI can transcribe a meeting or a lecture?

Noota gives you 300 free minutes a month; if you code, Kyutai’s model runs locally. Always get consent from the people being recorded.

Further reading

• Free AI deals for students: every discount and free tier, compared.
• France in the AI race: the Mistral case: why Mistral matters beyond its assistant.
• French AI startups: the ecosystem at a glance, funding rounds included.
• Revising with AI without cheating: how to use these tools as a coach.