Every tech company is getting into artificial intelligence. (Even Apple, soon.) The web browser Opera has an artificially intelligent chatbot called Aria, which at first glance doesn't look much different from any other chatbot you might encounter in 2024. However, Opera has added some neat features that actually make the bot more useful than I expected.
Aria looks like a typical browser chatbot at first glance
Unlike Google or Microsoft, Opera doesn't have its own AI technology. In contrast, Opera's chatbot Aria is powered by OpenAI and Google. That way, whether using ChatGPT or Gemini, the response itself isn't revolutionary and is pretty much what you'd expect.
Aria is located in Opera's sidebar as a snazzy "A" icon. To use Aria, you need an Opera account, so if you haven't set up an account yet, Opera will walk you through that. This means it will take a few attempts for the browser to recognize that you have a connected account.
Once up and running, Aria presents a typical chatbot interface: If I can't think of what to ask, I'm presented with three different starting options. These change every time I refresh the bot, but the first time I ran it, I was greeted with: "How do I make a great resume?" "Can you recommend fun activities to do indoors on a rainy day?" “What is the most satisfying activity in my free time?”
If you don't find any of the prompts helpful (I usually didn't), you can go to the actual chat box. If you've used ChatGPT or Gemini, the initial experience is the same: enter what you want to ask, hit send, and wait for a reply. Opera takes a little longer than some other chatbots, but returns typical answers.
What's cool, however, is that this AI chatbot has two features that I haven't seen in other chatbots: As MakeUseOf highlights, if you highlight selected text in a response, you'll see to some extended options. It's nice to have a highlighting tool if you want to remember text selections in the future, but more relevantly, you'll find Reuse and Rephrase .
Reusing and rewriting does seem to work
Reuse will place the text selection above the text field as a mini-tab. If you ask Aria another question, it will merge your reused selections into your query. You can also "reuse" up to five text snippets from previous queries, giving you the opportunity to stack items you find useful. If you ask Aria about a famous figure like George Washington, you can extract facts from the responses with Reuse and ask Aria to generate a quiz based on those data points. If you're looking for dinner suggestions, you can extract elements from a reply and ask for a recipe based on that reply.
On the other hand, there is Rephrase . Other chatbots now have a rewrite option that will rewrite the entire response if it doesn't look right. But with Rephrase, you can ask Aria to retry specific text selections in the response, rather than the entire response itself. Opera even includes a fun animation when rewriting this section, changing each letter to any number of alphanumeric characters until a new sentence appears. If the entire response the chatbot gets is completely wrong, it makes sense to have it redo the entire thing. But rewriting seems to be useful for those situations where the response itself is solid, but a line or paragraph misses the mark.
The thing I find most difficult about this feature is punctuation: if you change just one sentence at a time, be aware that Aria accidentally removes periods or exclamation points.
Improve your answer
Like other chatbots, Opera also provides Aria with an optimization tool that can adjust the bot's responses to your preferences. This one is pretty good, though: First, you can choose the style of a blog post, email, essay, presentation, social post, speech, or article. Once you've selected one, enter the action you actually want your chatbot to perform, and choose a tone: formal, informal, neutral, academic, business, funny, or sarcastic. (Spoiler alert: Aria is not funny.)
Here's where you can really dig in: Under the "My Style" section, you can train Aria to write in your specific style. Aria first asks you to write a formal complaint expressing your choice in 5 to 10 sentences, a product review of your recent purchase in 4 to 8 sentences, and a post to a friend about your weekend plans. casual text messages. Finally, choose whether you want Aria's response to be short, medium, or long. Yo.
If you like a reply here, you can save it and treat it like a normal conversation with Aria - including reuse and rephrase options.
Not revolutionary, just helpful
If you haven't found AI chatbots that useful so far, Aria might not be the groundbreaking new tool you've been looking for. But if you already use artificial intelligence 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 response that actually provides an answer you can run.
If you're already a fan of the Opera browser, putting Aria in your sidebar is a low-key way to add AI to your daily routine.
