Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar

Opera’s adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles. The feature, called “shorten,” is part of the company’s broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft’s doing with Edge.

As shown in a demo included in Opera’s blog post, you can activate the feature by selecting the “shorten” button to the right of the address bar. From there, a sidebar with ChatGPT will pop out from the left, which will then generate a neat, bulleted summary of the article or webpage you’re looking at.

Opera’s announcement comes just days after Microsoft revealed the AI-powered Bing and Edge. While the company’s search engine will offer access to an AI chatbot that provides annotated answers to queries, Edge will come with an AI “copilot” that can similarly summarize webpages or articles, as well as generate text for social media posts and more. Google also showed off its AI search bot Bard earlier this week, although it’s not available for users to demo just yet.

“We are excited to see the rapid roll-out of developer programs for solutions such as Google Bard, for example, and are starting to build and roll out new experiences in web browsing that not very long ago seemed impossible to achieve,” Per Wetterdal, Opera’s head of strategic partnerships and AI ecosystem says in a statement.

The “shorten” feature isn’t available to everyone just yet, though. Jan Standel, the vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, tells The Verge that it’s going to “launch in browsers very soon.” Opera’s also working on other AI-powered features that “augment” the browsing experience and plans on adding “popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar,” although it’s not yet clear what this could entail.