Opera Browser Comes Up With Its Own ChatGPT-Powered AI Sidebar App

Microsoft is not the only one to integrate generative AI into web browsers. Opera has also joined the league. Recently, it announced that it has its own chatty AI companion called Aria for its eponymous web browser. However, this isn’t Opera’s first strike into the segment. The company has already included a sidebar in the browser dedicated to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Aria will be launched in over 180 countries. It can already be tested in its beta version within the Opera One browser for Android as well as desktop. However, you will require to sign up with an Opera account to get access.

The browser will first add your Opera account to the waitlist like how Bing Chat and Google Bard did in their early days. You will be allowed to access the Aria AI from the browser’s sidebar only after approval. As per the company’s words, it is planning deeper integration for the GPT-fueled AI in its browser. This integration would have the eventual goal of native blending. It will enable to such an extent that it will let users “perform cross-browser tasks.”

Smarter capabilities, better accessibility

Aria can connect to the web and can pull up-to-date results and current information. This is considered one of the biggest advantages of Aria over ChatGPT for now. On the other side, ChatGPT will just surface information as recent as 2021. This is because that’s how far back the ChatGPT date range goes. Furthermore, it doesn’t offer a web browsing facility to all users, till now.

Microsoft announced Bing as the default search engine service for ChatGPT in May. The web browsing facility itself is enabled via a dedicated plug-in. This facility is currently available only to ChatGPT Plus users. For personal use, one has to pay a subscription service cost of $20 per month. Still, it is not enabled for free for the users. However, it is heard that there are plans to do so down the road.

On another side, Aria is widely being marketed as an internet-connected “free service with up-to-date information”. This would let users pull fresh results from the web. Apart from web browsing, Aria does possess the usual generative AI capabilities. These include helping write code, find product listings, and provide summarized answers. Aria has also been natively trained on all of Opera’s support documents. This means it can extract the relevant help page for all browser-related queries.

Also, check this blog on Meta security analysts’ warnings on malicious ChatGPT imposters.

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