Every tech company is getting in on AI. (Even Apple, soon enough.) Opera, the web browser, has an AI chatbot it calls Aria, that at first doesn’t seem much different than any other chatbot you may run across in 2024. However, Opera has added some clever features here that actually make the bot a bit more useful than I expected.
Aria seems like a typical browser chatbot at first
Unlike Google or Microsoft, Opera doesn’t have its own AI technology. Instead, Opera’s chatbot, Aria, is powered by both OpenAI and Google. In that way, none of the responses themselves are that revolutionary, and are pretty much what you’d expect, whether using ChatGPT or Gemini.
Aria lives in the sidebar of Opera, as a funky “A” icon. To use Aria, you need to have an Opera account, so if you haven’t set one up yet, Opera will walk you through it. That said, it takes a few tries for the browser to recognize you’ve connected your account.
Once up and running, Aria presents a typical chatbot interface: I’m presented with three different starting point options if I can’t think of anything to ask it. These change every time you refresh the bot, but on my first run through, I was greeted by: “How do I make a great resume?” “Can you suggest fun activities to do indoors on a rainy day?” “What are the most satisfying activities for my free time?”
If you don’t find any of the prompts helpful (I usually don’t), you can move onto the actual chat box. If you’ve used ChatGPT or Gemini, the initial experience is the same: Type of what you want to ask, hit send, and wait for a response. Opera takes a moment longer than some other chatbots, but comes back with typical answers.
What’s cool, however, is that this AI chatbot has two features I haven’t seen with other chatbots: As highlighted by MakeUseOf, if you highlight a selection of text in the response, you’ll see some extended options. There’s a highlight tool which is fine if you want to keep that text selection in mind the in the future, but more pertinently, you’ll find Reuse and Rephrase.
Reuse and rephrase seem genuinely useful
Reuse will drop the text selection just above the text field as a mini tab. If you ask Aria another question, it incorporates your reused selection in your query. You can “reuse” up to five text snippets from a previous query, too, so you have your chance to stack items you found useful. If you’re asking Aria about a famous figure, like George Washington, you can pull facts from the response with Reuse and ask Aria to generate a quiz from those data points. If you’re looking for dinner suggestions, you can pull elements from one response and ask for a recipe based on that.
Credit: Jake Peterson
On the flip side, there’s Rephrase. Now, other chatbots have a rephrase option, which rewrites an entire response if it doesn’t seem right. But with Rephrase, you can ask Aria to try again on specific selections of text in the response, rather than the entire response itself. Opera even includes a fun animation as it rewrites the section, changing each letter into any number of alphanumeric characters until landing on the new statement. If the chatbot gets a whole response totally wrong, it’d make sense to have it redo the whole thing. But Rephrase seems like it’d be useful for those times where the response itself is solid, but a line or a paragraph just didn’t hit the mark.
Where I’ve seen this feature struggle most is with punctuation: if you are only changing a sentence at a time, just watch out for Aria accidentally wiping out a period or an exclamation point.
Refine your responses
Like other chatbots, Opera also has a refinement tool for Aria to adjust the bot’s responses to your liking. This one’s pretty good though: First up, you have your choice between style as a blog post, email, essay, presentation, social post, speech, or article. After choosing one, enter what you actually want the chatbot to do, then choose a tone: formal, informal, neutral, academic, business, funny, or sarcastic. (Spoiler alert: Aria is not funny.)
Here’s where you can really get into the weeds: Under the “My Style” section, you can train Aria to write in your particular style. Aria first asks you to write a formal complaint to the establishment of your choice in five to 10 sentences, a product review for something you bought recently in four to eight sentences, and a casual text to a friend about weekend plans. Finally, choose whether you want Aria’s response to be short, medium, or long. Phew.
If you like a response here, you can save it, and treat it like a normal conversation with Aria—Reuse and Rephrase options included.
Not revolutionary, just helpful
If you haven’t found AI chatbots all that useful thus far, Aria might not be the groundbreaking new tool you’ve been looking for. But if you’re already using AI on a daily basis, these tools seem useful. I particularly like the reuse option: It seems like an efficient way to break down the most useful parts of a previous response and generate a new one that actually delivers an answer you can run with.
If you’re already a fan of the Opera browser, having Aria in the sidebar is an unobtrusive way to add AI to your routine.
