Opera is putting all of its eggs in the AI game. The company announced this week that it will begin incorporating generative AI capabilities into its web browser with a feature called “Shorten,” which will make use of ChatGPT to produce summaries of webpages and articles.
A brand-new icon will appear to the right of the address bar when the tool becomes available to the general public. ChatGPT will provide a bulleted summary of the webpage you are currently viewing in a sidebar that can be accessed by tapping it.
The Verge was informed by Opera’s vice president of marketing and communications, Jan Standel, that Shorten will begin rolling out to users “very soon.” The company is working on additional AI-powered features that it claims will “augment” the Opera experience, but the details of those enhancements were not provided.
Shorten’s announcement comes the same week that Microsoft said it would redesign Edge to include an “AI-powered copilot.” The company’s new Prometheus model can summarize web pages, among other things. Google also announced this past week that it is developing Bard, an AI chatbot based on its LaMDA platform.
Opera and Microsoft may see generative AI as a way to challenge Google’s dominance over the browser market, as suggested by the timing of the announcements. However, it remains to be seen whether those additions actually encourage users to abandon Chrome.