Browser company Opera has launched a new artificial intelligence agent called BrowserOperator that can complete tasks for users on different websites. In a demo video, the company showed an AI agent finding a suitable pair of socks from Walmart; buying football game tickets from a club website; and finding flights and hotels on Booking.com. Opera says the feature will soon be available to users through its FeatureDrop program.
Opera already has artificial intelligence features that also let users ask questions about the web pages they're browsing.
It's unclear whether the agent can work on a single website, or if it can understand and complete broader queries, such as "Find me the cheapest flights from London to New York tomorrow," as well as cross-site queries.
The company says users can see what the browser operator is doing and they can control the screen at any time. Opera claims that the proxy is more secure than competing products because it runs on-device rather than on the browser's cloud instance or virtual machine.
The promise of the feature is the same as other proxies on the market: You describe a task to the agent, and it navigates the website as it completes the task.
There is fierce competition in this field: OpenAI's artificial intelligence agent, called Operator, also uses a browser and is available to ChatGPTPro users; the browser company that produces Arc Browser has announced that the new browser Dia will have agent functions, and Perplexity is preparing to launch its own browser called Comet.