Browser maker Opera is collaborating with Google to bring Gemini AI to the Opera browser. Specifically, they are working with Google on Google Cloud.
As Neowin reported, Google and Opera will collaborate on Opera's Aria browser AI.
Opera’s Aria uses multiple large language models (LLMs) to curate an AI experience in the browser. Some LLMs that Opera uses in the Composer AI engine include Meta’s Llama and Mixtral from Mistral AI. It also already uses local LLMs like Google’s Gemma or Vicuna.
“Our companies have been cooperating for more than 20 years. We are excited to be announcing the deepening of this collaboration into the field of generative AI to further power our suite of browser AI services,” Per Wetterdal, EVP Partnerships at Opera, said in a statement.
From Opera’s press release, it appears the big features coming to Aria are around image generation and voice output.
Google’s Imagen 2 model will power generic image creation. Google just announced Imagen 3 during IO 2024, but it hasn’t reached the masses yet. It’ll be interesting how soon Opera gets access to Imagen 3 for the browser, if at all. That said, the Imagen 2 model just launched less than three months ago.
“We believe the future of AI will be open, so we’re providing access to the best of Google’s infrastructure, AI products, platforms and foundation models to empower organizations to chart their course with generative AI,” said Eva Fors, Managing Director, Google Cloud Nordic Region.
With the newest AI features, Aria is supposed to be able to read responses in a “conversational-like fashion” based on Google’s text-to-audio model.
Opera has been pursuing a modular AI model since June of last year when Opera One launched. Aria was introduced and was powered by OpenAI’s GPT model. ChatGPT was added to the browser in February of last year.
Opera is no stranger to following the latest computing trends. In 2022, It launched one of the first blockchain web browsers designed to make it easier to exchange “Ether.” It’s unclear if Opera is still operating in Crypto, though, since it hasn’t had any updates on that front in a year.
