Opera is adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles. The feature it being called “shorten”, and is the first step in the company’s plans to incorporate AI tools into its browser. This is similar to what Microsoft is doing with Edge.
Read: Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard spouts misinformation upon reveal
As you can see in the demo, you can activate the feature by selecting the “shorten” button to the right of the address bar. From there, a sidebar with ChatGPT will pop out from the left, which will then generate a neat, bulleted summary of the article or webpage you’re looking at.
The company’s search engine offers access to an AI chatbot that provides annotated answers to queries, but Edge takes it a step further. Microsoft is adding a “co-pilot” to Edge that can similarly summarize webpages or articles, as well as generate text for social media posts and more. Google’s reveal of Bard didn’t go down as it would’ve hoped, publicly humiliating its engineers which was not happy with the rushed rollout.
“We are excited to see the rapid roll-out of developer programs for solutions such as Google Bard, for example, and are starting to build and roll out new experiences in web browsing that not very long ago seemed impossible to achieve,” Per Wetterdal, Opera’s head of strategic partnerships and AI ecosystem says in a statement.
According to Jan Standel, the vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, it is going to “launch in browsers very soon.” Opera’s also working on other AI-powered features that “augment” the browsing experience and plans on adding “popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar,” although it’s not yet clear what this could entail.
The browser and search battles are heating up with the inclusion of AI technology, and we’ll be looking at it with interest for the foreseeable future.
