Opera is investing heavily on artificial intelligence. The business announced intentions this week to integrate generative AI capabilities into its web browser, beginning with “Shorten,” a tool that would employ ChatGPT to write summaries of articles and websites. When the tool is made public, you’ll see a new icon to the right of the address bar. Touching it will open a sidebar with a bulleted summary of the webpage you’re seeing via ChatGPT.
According to Jan Standel, vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, Shorten will be available to users “very shortly.” The business is working on more AI-powered features that it claims would “enhance” the Opera experience, but no details were provided.
The news of Shorten comes in the same week that Microsoft claimed it was revamping Edge to include a “AI-powered copilot” to the browser. Web page summarization is one of the capabilities of the company’s new Prometheus model. Google also revealed this week that it is working on Bard, an AI chatbot powered by its LaMDA platform. The timing of the releases shows that Opera and Microsoft see generative AI as a chance to disrupt Google’s browser market dominance. But, whether or not such changes cause consumers to abandon Chrome remains to be seen.
