Opera is Integrating ChatGPT Into its Sidebar

Opera is expanding its sidebar with a ChatGPT-powered tool that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles.

You can activate the feature by selecting the “shorten” button to the right of the address bar, as shown in a demo included in Opera’s blog post. From there, a ChatGPT sidebar will appear on the left, generating a neat, bulleted summary of the article or webpage you’re viewing.

The announcement by Opera comes just days after Microsoft unveiled AI-powered Bing and Edge. While the company’s search engine will include an AI chatbot that provides annotated answers to queries, Edge will include an AI “copilot” that can summarize webpages or articles, as well as generate text for social media posts and other purposes. 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 long ago seemed impossible to achieve,” says Per Wetterdal, Opera’s head of strategic partnerships and AI ecosystem.

However, the “shorten” feature is not yet available to everyone. Opera’s vice president of marketing and communications, Jan Standel, tells The Verge that it will “launch in browsers very soon.” Opera is also working on other AI-powered features to “enhance” the browsing experience, as well as plans to add “popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar,” though details are scarce.