Aria conversation: you can now talk to Aria in Opera Developer – AI Feature Drop

March 13th, 2025

We continue to introduce and test AI Feature Drops in Opera Developer, our desktop testing environment. Today’s drop lets you interact with our built-in browser AI, Aria, using your voice. Now you can speak – even hold a conversation – with Aria, request all manner of information, and even have it generate images based on your verbal cues.

Last year we made it possible for Aria to read its answers aloud, improving accessibility and giving you information in a different format. Today, in a logical next step, we are introducing an interface where you can have fully verbal conversations with Aria.

Converse with Aria

This Feature Drops allows Aria to understand what you’re saying and interact with you via verbal conversation. Additionally, it will generate a text-based conversation in the background that you can access afterwards. When talking to Aria, you can make use of its different capabilities that we’ve introduced in the past – for example, you can also ask it to generate images for you.

We’re enabling Aria’s conversational capabilities by using OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition model, while for the voice output we continue to use Google’s Wavenet.

How to talk with Aria

The first thing you’ll need to do in order to start a conversation with Aria is to update Opera Developer to its latest version – or download it here, if you haven’t already.

After that, it’s pretty easy to start talking to Aria. Let’s see how it works:

Open Aria in the side panel by clicking on its icon.

Then click on the microphone icon to the right of the text input bar.

If it’s your first time using this feature you’ll be asked to give Aria access to use your microphone while it’s in use.

Afterwards, a new interface will appear which indicates that Aria is listening. Now, simply start talking to Aria – ask anything you want! Here we’ll ask it to create an image with happy dogs 🙂

Aria will tell you “I’m listening” at the top of the screen to indicate that it’s your turn to talk – your mic will only be on when Aria says that it’s listening. Once you’ve given it a prompt it will say “I’m thinking” when it’s processing it, and then it will speak. Once you’ve started a conversation with Aria it will show you the transcription of what you’re saying at the bottom of the interface, above the microphone icon.

Aria understands when you’re finished talking and responds to you with a human-like voice. If you requested specific information, it will tell you all the details, and if you requested an image – like we just did – then it will tell you that your image is ready:

You can keep interacting with Aria by simply talking to it. In this case, we want to see even more dogs! So that’s what we’ll ask:

Finally, if you stop talking, Aria will automatically exit the conversation mode and show you the transcript of what you’ve just been talking about. In this case, we get a bunch of happy dogs to cheer up your day 🙂