Opera has announced a new feature that will be added to the sidebar of its browser. Called “shorten”, the tool is a ChatGPT-powered tool that can be used to generate summaries of web pages and articles.
Opera’s announcement comes days after Microsoft unveiled AI-enabled Bing and Edge. While the company’s search engine will offer access to an AI chatbot that provides annotated answers to queries, Edge will feature an AI “co-pilot” that can similarly summarise web pages or articles, as well as generate text for social media posts, etc. Google also introduced its AI search bot Bard earlier this week, although it is not yet available to users.
“We’re excited to see the rapid rollout of development programs for solutions like Google Bard, for example, and we’re starting to build and deploy new web browsing experiences that seemed impossible not too long ago,” said Per Wetterdal, head of strategic partnerships and AI ecosystem at Opera, in a statement.
The “shorten” feature is not yet available to everyone, however. Jan Standal, vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, tells The Verge that it will “launch in browsers very soon”. Opera is also working on other AI-powered features that “augment” the browsing experience and plans to add “popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar”, although it’s not yet clear what this might entail.
