Opera’s AI Tools Are Really Useful
Every tech company is involved in artificial intelligence. (Even Apple, pretty soon.) The Opera web browser has an artificial intelligence chatbot it calls Aria, which at first glance doesn’t look much different from any other chatbot you might encounter in 2024. However, Opera has added some smart features. this actually makes the bot a little more useful than I expected.
At first glance, Aria looks like a typical browser-based chatbot.
Unlike Google or Microsoft, Opera does not have its own artificial intelligence technology. Instead, Opera’s chatbot, Aria, is powered by OpenAI and Google. So neither answer is that revolutionary on its own, and falls largely short of what’s expected, whether you’re using ChatGPT or Gemini .
Aria lives in Opera’s sidebar in the form of a funny “A” icon. To use Aria, you’ll need to have an Opera account, so if you haven’t set one up yet, Opera will walk you through it. However, it will take a few tries for the browser to recognize that you have connected your account.
Once launched, Aria presents a typical chatbot interface, giving me three different starting point options if I can’t think of anything to ask. These change every time you update the bot, but when I first started it, I was greeted with the question, “How do I write a great resume?” “Can you suggest some fun things to do at home on a rainy day?” “What leisure activities bring me the most pleasure?”
If any of the prompts don’t seem helpful to you (they usually don’t), you can go to the chat window. If you’ve used ChatGPT or Gemini, the initial experience will be the same: enter what you want to ask, hit send, and wait for a response. Opera takes a little longer than some other chatbots, but returns typical responses.
What’s interesting, however, is that this AI chatbot has two features that I haven’t seen in other chatbots: As MakeUseOf highlights , if you highlight a highlighted piece of text in a response, you’ll see some advanced options. There’s a highlight tool that’s good if you want to remember to highlight that text in the future, but more importantly, you’ll find Reuse and Rephrase .
Reusing and rephrasing seems really helpful
When used again, the selected text will be deleted directly above the text field as a mini-tab. If you ask Aria another question, she will include your reused selection in your query. You can also “reuse” up to five pieces of text from a previous query, so you have the opportunity to combine elements that you find useful. If you ask Aria about a famous figure, such as George Washington, you can extract facts from the answer using Reuse and ask Aria to create a quiz based on that data. If you’re looking for dinner suggestions, you can extract elements from one answer and ask for a recipe based on it.
On the other hand, there is Repphase . Other chatbots now have a paraphrase option that rewrites the entire response if it doesn’t seem right. But with the Paraphrase feature, you can ask Aria to try individual pieces of text in a response again, rather than the entire response. Opera even includes a fun animation that rewrites a section, replacing each letter with any number of alphanumeric characters until it lands on a new statement. If the chatbot gets a completely wrong answer, it makes sense to force it to repeat everything. But it seems like the Paraphrase feature would be useful in cases where the answer itself is clear, but the line or paragraph just didn’t hit the mark.
The biggest problem I’ve seen this feature have is punctuation: if you’re only changing a sentence at a time, just make sure Aria doesn’t accidentally remove a period or exclamation point.
Clarify your answers
Like other chatbots, Opera also has a refinement tool for Aria, allowing you to customize the bot’s responses to your liking. However, this option is pretty good: First, you have the choice between blog post, email, essay, presentation, social media post, speech, or article style. Once you’ve selected one of the options, enter what you actually want from the chatbot and then choose the tone: formal, informal, neutral, academic, businesslike, funny, or sarcastic. (Spoiler alert: Aria is not funny.)
Here’s where you can really get into the weeds: 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 your chosen establishment in five to ten sentences, a review of a product you recently purchased in four to eight sentences, and a basic message to a friend about your weekend plans. Finally, choose whether you want Aria’s answer to be short, medium, or long. Ugh.
If you liked the answer here, you can save it and treat it like a normal conversation with Aria – reuse and paraphrase options included.
Not revolutionary, just useful
If you still haven’t found AI chatbots that useful, Aria may not be the revolutionary new tool you’ve been looking for. But if you already use AI on a daily basis, these tools seem useful. I especially like the reuse option: it seems like an effective way to break up the most useful parts of a previous answer and create a new one that actually produces an answer you can work with.
If you’re already a fan of the Opera browser, having Aria in your sidebar is a discreet way to add artificial intelligence into your daily life.