Opera, maker of popular Opera Mini and Opera browsers today announced it now reached 100 million active news readers as of November 2017. The company has also mentioned that it will soon launch a dedicated news and content app, which will offer users with news and videos relevant to them.
The company’s own Artificial Intelligence is aimed at providing users with relevant content in a smart way. The AI engine designed observes users news-reading behavior in real time and learns from to provide them with personalized news offer. This way, the users get their news faster and also gives easy access to news and videos that interest them and also stay relevant.
The company says that it has witnessed 50% growth since its introduction in the Opera Mini browser back in January 2017. The usage data from November shows that the average user now spends 40 minutes every day inside the Opera browser and engages with about 65 and 81 news stories per day. This also helps publishers to push more interesting content and Opera has partnered with over 800 websites and publishers, including 96 Indonesian publication websites.
The Opera Habari app will also use the same AI-engine that the current Opera browsers use. With an aim to generate more interesting content Opera said that it has signed up with more than 800 publishers and websites for commercial relationships. AI-powered newsreader is available on Opera Mini and Opera for Android browser that can be downloaded from Opera website here.
Commenting on the same, Jan Standal, VP Product Marketing and Communication said:
People using their mobile phones want to consume content in a faster and easier way. The AI engine is designed to instantly provide personalized and localized content, right at their fingertips. We are thrilled to see such rapid growth both in terms of users and actual usage of the service. By first introducing the AI news reader into the popular Opera mobile browsers, used by 250 million people worldwide, we have managed to overcome one of the biggest challenges in making an AI newsreader truly smart, namely that of scale.
Building on the success of Opera Mini, we will continue developing our AI-service to make it one of the leading content discovery platforms in the world. The unique combination of a large user base with our deep technology skills gives Opera a unique position to achieve this goal. We are looking forward to releasing the new app in the near future.