In a press release published today, Opera has announced that it will be teaming up with Google, specifically Google Cloud, to make use of its Gemini AI models as a part of Opera"s Aria browser AI. Opera"s Aria utilises multiple LLMs rather than just one and now has access to the tools that have been developed for Gemini.
Per Wetterdal, EVP Partnerships at Opera, said the following:
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.
Eva Fors, Managing Director of Google Cloud Nordic Region, commented on the partnership, saying:
We’re happy to elevate our long standing cooperation with Opera by powering its AI innovation within the browser space.
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.
The main features advertised as being powered by Google Cloud are both Image Generation and Voice Output. These, included in the latest AI Feature Drop for Opera One Developer, use the Imagen 2 model on Vertex AI, and responses can be read out in a conversational-like fashion thanks to Google"s text-to-audio model.
Opera has been adding numerous AI features to its browser recently, even going so far as to allow locally run LLMs to be downloaded and used on computers, allowing for access to over 150 models from more than 50 families, including Meta"s Llama and Google"s Gemma.
This is Opera"s key point of difference to other browsers that it is pursuing, ever since the launch of Opera One back in June 2023, which is a big makeover to the original Opera web browser, including a modular design, Tab Islands to group open tabs, and the first introduction of the aforementioned Aria AI.