Opera is giving a major AI upgrade to its Opera Mini mobile web browser. The company is embedding its Aria AI assistant into the Android version of Opera Mini, whose low-cost, data-saving approach to browsing is used by more than a hundred million people globally.

Aria will aid Opera Mini users by answering questions, generating text or software code, creating images, summarizing webpages, and pulling real-time info from the internet. Aria relies on Composer, Opera’s own AI engine, which stitches together tools and models from both OpenAI and Google, including making images with Google’s Imagen 3 model.

"AI is rapidly becoming an integral part of the daily internet experience – bringing Aria to Opera Mini is a natural addition to our most-downloaded browser," Opera executive vice president Jørgen Arnesen explained in a statement. "With the addition of our built-in AI, Aria, we’re excited to explore how AI can further enhance the feature set our users rely on every day.”

Pianissimo Opera AI

Opera Mini is popular because it can provide a web browser that doesn't use too much bandwidth. AI assistants like ChatGPT or Google Gemini tend to rely on a significant amount of energy and computational power. In many parts of the world, AI features are only available to people with the latest flagship phones, massive storage, or expensive subscriptions.

What Opera Mini is doing with Aria offers an alternative, one built to fit a browser already designed for places with unreliable connections, slow speeds, and high data costs. If you have an Android device, you can simply update the Opera Mini browser and start using Aria.

The release sets an interesting precedent. As AI becomes a staple in digital tools, developers have to consider not only how to make AI smarter and more powerful but also more flexible and accessible to people in different circumstances. Opera Mini's addition of Aria could end up being the example developers refer to when creating an AI assistant that won't eat up all your storage space or data budget.

Opera has teased that other new Mini features are in the pipeline, though it hasn’t said exactly what they will be. If the new features blend with the browser like Aria, it could end up as a semi-independent path toward AI adoption, one very different from its flashier cousins.

You might also like...