The age of AI browsing: How Microsoft, Google, others are making browsers smarter

Source: Pixabay

Many years ago — at the dawn of the digital era — a senior ad executive told this writer “It’s not a yoga asana that we can just get up and start doing.” His gripe was what his clients wanted. “Lets do digital” was the mantra without many people understanding what digital advertising encompassed. Replace digital with AI and that’s where we are right now. Here an AI, there an AI, everywhere an AI is the mantra these days. And AI is very much getting there in your web browser.

Google and Microsoft can’t go without a minute without talking about AI. What this means is that your browsers — Chrome and Edge — are getting smarter, thanks to AI.

Microsoft has gone all guns blazing when it comes to AI. The Edge browser — courtesy Copilot powered by ChatGPT — can easily summarise web pages, answering your questions directly, and suggesting relevant articles based on your reading. Microsoft Copilot leverages Bing’s knowledge base and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to provide accurate and up-to-date information.

Google Chrome remains the most popular web browser in the world. After settling in Gmail and G-Suite of productivity apps, Google’s Help me Write feature makes its way to Chrome. It is an experimental AI-powered feature to help you write with more confidence on the web. Google says that whether you want to leave a well-written review for a restaurant, craft a friendly RSVP for a party or make a formal inquiry about an apartment rental, Help me Write can be really helpful. Google has also got its text-to-image diffusion model to Chrome. Users can personalise Chrome browser even more. One can generate custom themes based on a subject, mood, visual style and colour. Expect more AI feature in Chrome in the coming months.

When there’s so much AI, at times it gets hard to track of new things. But one thing that certainly caught our eye was Arc Browser’s Search engine. Forget clunky web searches, Arc's new "Browse for Me" feature uses AI to give you the answer in seconds. Ask a question on your iPhone and Arc scours the web, reading and summarising  multiple pages for you. It creates a nice mini website for you on the basis of what you’ve searched for. This is just a taste of what AI can do in browsing, and while it's currently only on iPhones, expect it to hit Windows and Android soon.

If you're wondering what Apple is doing with Safari, then come June 2024 and we expect to see AI-powered feature making its way to Apple's browser as well.  Apple may have been caught on the back foot when it comes to generative AI but does have the might to get it right.