Opera is betting the company on AI, short for artificial intelligence. A new feature called “Shorten” will use ChatGPT to summarize articles and web pages. This is the first step in the company’s plan to add generative AI to its web browser.
Once the feature is made available to the public, a new button will appear to the right of the address bar. With a tap, ChatGPT will open a sidebar with a bulleted summary of the current page.
Opera’s vice president of marketing and communications, Jan Standel, told The Verge that the company plans to roll out Shorten to users “very soon.” Other AI-powered features are in development, which the company says will “augment” the Opera experience, though it provides no further details.
Shorten was announced the same week Microsoft said it would redesign Edge to include a “AI-powered copilot” for the browser. One of the capabilities of the new Prometheus model developed by the company is the ability to summarise web pages.
We reported last week that Google announced it is developing an artificial intelligence chatbot called “Bard” that will be run on the Tech Giant’s LaMDA platform.
Given the proximity of the announcements, it’s likely that Opera and Microsoft are looking at generative AI as a way to challenge Google’s dominance in the browser market. Whether or not those upgrades will convince people to stop using Chrome is yet to be seen.
