Every technology company uses artificial intelligence. (Even Apple, soon.) Operaweb browser, has an AI chatbot it calls Aria, which at first glance doesn’t look much different from any other chatbots you might come across in 2024. However, Opera has added some nifty features here that actually make the bot a bit more useful than I expected.
At first glance, Aria looks like a typical browser chatbot
Unlike Google or Microsoft, Opera does not have its own own Artificial intelligence technology. Instead, Opera’s chatbot, Aria, is powered by both OpenAI and Google. In this way, none of the answers are that revolutionary in themselves, and are pretty much what you’d expect whether you’re using ChatGPT or Gemini.
Aria lives on in the Opera sidebar as the funky “A” icon. To utilize 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 that you’ve linked your account.
Once launched, Aria presents a typical chatbot interface: three different starting point options appear if I can’t think of anything to ask. These change every time you refresh the bot, but the first time I launched it I was greeted with the question: “How do I make a great resume?” “Can you suggest fun activities to do at home on a rainy day?” “What are the most satisfying leisure activities?”
If you don’t find any of the suggestions helpful (I usually don’t), you can skip to the actual chat window. If you’ve used ChatGPT or Gemini, the initial experience is the same: type in what you want to ask, click send, and wait for the response. Opera takes a while longer than other chatbots, but returns with typical responses.
What’s nippy, though, is that this AI chatbot has two features that I haven’t seen in other chatbots: As highlighted in MakeUseOf, if you select selected text in the reply, you will see some extended options. There is a highlighting tool which is fine if you want to keep text selected in the future, but you’ll find it more pertinent Reuse AND Go over everything again.
Reuse and rephrasing seem really useful
Reusing will drop the selected text just above the text box in a mini-card format. If you ask Aria another question, the reused selection will be included in the query. You can also “reuse” up to five pieces of text from a previous query, giving you a chance to combine elements you found useful. If you are asking Aria about a celebrated figure such as George Washington, you can extract facts from the answer with Reuse and ask Aria to generate a quiz based on these data points. If you’re looking for dinner suggestions, you can pull elements from one answer and ask for the recipe based on that.
Source: Jake Peterson
On the other hand, it is Go over everything again. Now other chatbots have a rephrasing option that rewrites the entire response if it doesn’t seem right. But with Rephrase, you can ask Aria to try reselecting specific pieces of text in a response, rather than the entire response. Opera even includes a fun animation as you rewrite this section, changing each letter to any number of alphanumeric characters until you reach a up-to-date statement. If the chatbot receives a completely wrong answer, it would make sense to repeat the whole thing. However, it seems like Rephrase would be useful in situations where the answer itself is solid, but the line or paragraph just didn’t hit the mark.
I see this feature having the biggest issues with punctuation: if you’re only changing a sentence at a time, just be careful that Aria accidentally erases a period or exclamation point.
Refine your answers
Like other chatbots, Opera also has a tool that allows Aria to customize the bot’s response to your preferences. This one is pretty nippy though: First, you have the choice between the style of a blog post, email, essay, presentation, social media post, speech, or article. Once you’ve chosen one, enter what you actually want from the chatbot and then choose your tone: formal, informal, neutral, academic, businesslike, humorous, or sarcastic. (Spoiler alert: Aria is not humorous.)
This is where you can really dig into the details: In the “My Style” section, you can teach Aria to write in your specific style. Aria first asks you to write a formal complaint to the establishment of your choice in five to ten sentences, a review of a product you recently purchased in four to eight sentences, and a uncomplicated text to a friend about your weekend plans. Finally, choose whether you want Aria’s response to be low, medium, or long. Phew.
If you like the answer, you can save it and treat it like a regular conversation with Aria – reuse and rephrasing options are available.
Not revolutionary, just helpful
If you haven’t found AI chatbots very useful so far, Aria may not be the up-to-date breakthrough tool you’ve been looking for. However, if you already utilize AI on a daily basis, these tools seem useful. I particularly like the reuse option: it seems to be an effective way to break down the most useful parts of the previous answer and generate a up-to-date one that actually provides an answer you can work with.
If you’re already a fan of the Opera browser, having Aria in your sidebar is a considerate way to add AI to your routine.
