iOS Expansion: Opera Brings 'Aria' AI Assistant to iPhones After Surpassing 1M Users

0:00Today on the podcast, Opera's iOS web browser has now gained an AI companion which is called Aria. We're going to be talking about what this means for the web browsing industry, and if this is a threat to Google in some way in a search play. Let's dive into it. So the headline here is essentially that Opera is expanding the reach of its browser AI assistant, ARIA. The latest announcement from the company revealed that its web browser app for iOS is now going to also integrate ARIA. This is something that they rolled out before in the past for web browser, and now this is going to step further onto their app.

0:34This is a project that was developed jointly with OpenAI. And notably, this feature comes at no additional cost for app users, right? This is a really big deal. If you're using GPT-4, you're going to have to pay for it. And so similar to what Bing has done with their integration of ChatGPT and GPT-4, this is not going to have any additional costs for users. And so it's kind of begging the question, who is footing the bill for all of that AI compute? Is that ARIA? Are they willing to do that as like a marketing expense, a sunk cost to help them gain more market share? I think it's going to be really interesting to see where that goes.

1:12Before this, Opera had actually rolled out ARIA for its desktop and Android versions, amassing over 1 million users. And this new rollout means that ARIA's AI capabilities are going to be available across all significant platforms, right? You have Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and now iOS. This is actually really interesting because typically what I see with software companies, especially ones out of Silicon Valley, etc., is that they'll do an iOS rollout first, right? We saw this with ChatGBT, OpenAI doing this. You see this a lot of different places. Essentially, iOS is the most lucrative platform because people that have iPhones spend a lot of money on their phone, and so they'll typically spend more money on apps and services that go along with it.

1:55so that's usually just the first thing that people will develop for and so it's kind of interesting seeing that they did this in reverse order and perhaps they saw that they had a bigger user base not on iOS I'm not sure but this is definitely a very big move or perhaps they decided that iOS was their most coveted user base and so they wanted to test things out elsewhere first I'm not 100 % sure but in any case it definitely is counter what is traditionally seen so however Opera is giving its users the autonomy to choose whether to use ARIA. It's an opt-in service, ensuring users are not, you know, compelled to use it.

2:29Once opted in, ARIA offers a variety of intelligent insights and also kind of responsive voice commands. So using ARIA does not require users to be logged into their Opera account, but for those without an existing account, setting, you know, one up via the app is super straightforward. So I think a really unique feature of ARIA is its foundation on Opera's Composer infrastructure. So this combined with OpenAI's GBT technology really enables ARIA to interact with various AI models. However, you know, Composer, I think, really kind of paves the way for ARIA's potential future expansion in the realm of search and AI services.

3:08So Opera actually hinted at some forthcoming enhancements in generative AI and other areas, which they plan to reveal soon. And I think that, you know, on the user interface front, ARIA's iOS version features a chatbot-like platform, which essentially, you know, it allows users to interact with ARIA either by typing questions or using voice command functions. And I think this proves as a really good alternative method to conventional web searching. So to access ARIA, users can navigate to the More menu on the Opera iOS apps bottom navigation bar. Well, something that I think is really interesting here is just the thought that right now they may actually expand this to search, right?

3:49They have over a million users using this right now. And I think something that Google is definitely concerned about is right now there's a lot of different browsers that have gained some popularity. Of course, Google Chrome is the biggest web browser, but there are a lot of others that are quite popular. And if all of those started integrating AI search, you know, the AI, like AI search assistants, essentially, that could start eating into what Google would like to, you know, be as the main search engine. So this is interesting. This isn't something new. I've seen this. I personally use the Brave browser, not sponsored, but I've used them for a long time.

4:26That's just my personal favorite. It's built on Chromium, which is pretty much the same platform used for Google Chrome. And so they actually have been integrating this long before Google was where essentially if you did a search on Brave, they have like their own search engine thing, which to be honest, isn't my favorite. I like the browser, don't love their search. But if you do a search on their search engine, they'll have like an AI generated snippet at the top, which I actually did find useful a lot of the time. So it'll be interesting to see if Opera begins doing the same thing when you do searches on Opera, if they have like a snippet.

4:59And you know, a lot, I think what's interesting here is it could almost get now I don't know if they'll do this and Google may push back but you can almost imagine a world where even if Google was set as the default browser search page that there could be an AI generated snippet on top of you know the page if it's on the Opera browser on the Brave browser or whatever one of these third-party browsers where there's like an AI generated snippet at the top with a little link essentially stealing some link juice or some, you know, priority placement from Google or others. Now, if users don't like it, then they might just ditch the platform altogether.

5:33So I guess that would be the risk in a move like that. But it's gonna be interesting to see if they roll out some sort of search feature. And if so, what that looks like. I think, you know, last month's announcement of ARIA reaching the 1 million user mark, I think it also really kind of highlighted some positive impacts on Opera's metrics. Opera's co-CEO Lin Song expressed essentially that he was pretty happy about that and said, quote, as encouraging as the initial adoption of ARIA has been, we are equally pleased with the quality of the user's early engagement with the AI tool. We're also seeing a lift in total time spent with increased searches and page views per session.

6:11I think that's really important statistics to look at right there, right? It's not just about, you know, more users downloaded it and tried it, but they actually used it longer. They did more page views. They did more searches, AKA more interaction. And one could argue that they became more educated on whatever topics they were researching. So that's one side of the coin. The other side is that, well, maybe it's not as effective if they're spending more time, right? Maybe a quick search would be done, but maybe a quick search and they didn't get what they wanted. They just gave up would be another scenario for a quick search.

6:41So either way, I think this is definitely an interesting metric to follow. I think it is important to note that Opera isn't a newcomer to the AI area. They were actually ahead of the curve with the introduction of AI prompts designed to essentially enable users to swiftly interact with generative AI services. And this allowed for functions like summarizing articles, generating tweets, and requesting content based on highlighted text. So they have been at the forefront with all of this. beyond ARIA, I think the Opera app for iOS comes with a lot of different features built in. They have ad blocking, a complementary VPN, tracking prevention, a crypto wallet, and private browsing capabilities.

7:21And this is really similar to what we're seeing with the Brave app, you know, pretty much the same features, although I'm not 100 % sure if they have a complementary VPN built in. So you may want to look at that. But overall, it's kind of interesting seeing what offerings these third-party browsers that are not, you know, Apple's Safari or Google Chrome, the two big ones, what they're offering to try to, you know, get people over to use their platforms. And to be honest, it's quite compelling, right? We've seen Google Chrome kind of have pushback against ad blocking plugins and whatnot. And so, you know, finding finding an entire browser that has that as a core functionality is very interesting to people.

7:56And now that they're doing a lot of this really impressive AI integrations, I think people are going to like them even more. So this is definitely an area we'll continue to follow very interesting company and some great rollouts.