If you are a former Opera user who gave it up when it started to lag behind the rapid innovations of rival browsers like Edge and Vivaldi, then you’ll be surprised to see how far it’s come now. A completely refreshed user interface across mobile and desktop aside, Opera has also gone big on generative AI. Continuing the barrage of AI-related announcements in recent months, the browser has now launched “Aria,” a Bing Chat-like AI that sits in the browser’s upgraded sidebar. Aria helps users find information on the web and generate text and code. It also provides support for the browser itself, being trained on “internal docs.” But most importantly, Aria’s knowledge isn’t limited to the events until 2021 because it’s being “constantly fed new information” unlike ChatGPT. What is Aria like? Firing up its Aria on Opera’s latest developer build on desktop reveals a familiar interface. It’s quite similar to ChatGPT with a plus button at the top-right corner to start a new conversation and a panel toward the left to access chat history. Since the chatbot is plugged into the internet, it’s very much capable of doubling up as a search engine. You’d have to verify its outputted information, though, because like any other AI chatbot, Aria may be prone to ‘hallucinations’ or making/mixing up information. Asking Aria about the top smartphones to buy in 2023 generated an accurate list with rather brief descriptions. When the same prompt is fed to Bing Chat – Microsoft Edge’s version of Aria – it returns a much more detailed output, complete with citations and sources. Aria doesn’t support citations at the moment. However, compared to Bing Chat, Aria’s tone seems more assertive. When asked why Sam Altman is pulling ChatGPT out of Europe, Aria pointed out that the information is incorrect and specified why. Meanwhile, Bing Chat led with the reasons behind OpenAI exiting Europe, which are now out of date because Altman has confirmed that he’s indeed not pulling out of the EU. All in all, Aria is a promising chatbot that can help make Opera relevant again if done right – and with the right marketing budget. Opera now directly competes against Microsoft Edge with the addition of Aria since no other browser currently offers integrated AI chatbot support.
