Artificial Intelligence Enhancement Launch by Opera Mini, Intended to Compete with Google and Microsoft Browsers
Opera Mini, a popular lightweight mobile browser, has announced the integration of its AI assistant, Aria, across its entire lineup of browsers on both desktop and mobile. This move marks Opera's most ambitious attempt to challenge tech giants Google and Microsoft in the AI-enabled mobile browser space.
Aria enhances the web experience by offering real-time information retrieval, article summarization, text and code generation, image creation, and intelligent assistance for learning and research. The AI is designed to be lightweight, ensuring it does not increase the app's size or data usage, making it suitable for Opera Mini's core user base.
With Aria embedded into its platform, Opera Mini aims to be the AI for everyone, offering advanced AI tools without breaking data budgets. Users can chat with Aria to ask questions, generate content, search the web, and perform AI-assisted tasks within the browser. Aria can be accessed from the main menu or start page.
One of Aria's key features is its smarter contextual responses. It now detects specific categories in user chats, such as recipes, shopping, and gaming, and responds with enhanced content, multiple suggestions, and relevant hyperlinks to specific items or information. For example, instead of offering a single recipe, it provides three different options along with links, making it more useful and interactive.
Opera’s AI also includes image generation and voice output capabilities integrated into the assistant, enhancing interactivity and usability beyond text chat alone. Additionally, Aria supports summaries of long articles and reports for faster comprehension, supporting over 50 languages and requiring no user account, which simplifies access and use.
In regions where mobile data is expensive, Opera Mini offers a data-conscious alternative through data compression technology. Kenya is Opera Mini's biggest market, boasting 13 million users, or 12% of the mobile browser's global base. In Nigeria, 59% of users in a March 2025 survey said mobile data is too costly, and more than half reported running out of data before the end of the month. Opera Mini addresses this issue by compressing content and offering promotional data bundles through local telecom partnerships, potentially saving Nigerian users an equivalent of $27 million in data.
As of Q1 2025, Opera ranks as the sixth-largest browser globally with a 2.2% market share and serves 380 million monthly active users. The integration of Aria is set to benefit over 100 million users worldwide, many in data-conscious markets like Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Comparatively, Opera Mini's Aria AI stands out from AI-enabled browsers from Google and Microsoft. While Google and Microsoft focus heavily on integrating AI across their broader ecosystems—Google with Bard and search, Microsoft with Copilot and Microsoft 365—Opera stands out with a convenient, privacy-conscious assistant embedded directly in a lightweight mobile browser, making it highly accessible on Android devices without an account requirement.
In summary, Opera Mini's Aria AI offers advanced, user-friendly AI capabilities with enhanced contextual understanding, multimodal support, and no-login access. It is a strong contender especially for mobile users prioritizing privacy, compactness, and immediate AI assistance within the browsing experience.
Aria's integration within Opera Mini's entire lineup of browsers extends its AI capabilities to include services like real-time information retrieval, text and code generation, and image creation, all while maintaining a lightweight system that does not increase app size or data usage. With Aria's smarter contextual responses, users can now interact with more useful and interactive AI assistance across various categories, such as recipes, shopping, and gaming.
