Latest news with #TheBrowserCompany
The Star
19 hours ago
- Business
- The Star
This AI web browser can perform certain tasks for you
Dia is currently only available to a very limited number of testers. — The Browser Company The Browser Company has launched a new web browser in beta for a limited number of users. It is designed around integrated artificial intelligence that can understand context and act on your behalf, like a true online personal assistant. Named Dia, this web browser is currently only available to existing users of Arc, the former alternative browser project from The Browser Company, which has now been suspended. For the time being, Dia is only compatible with macOS and only works on devices equipped with M1 chips or later. This means that this beta version is not yet intended for a wide audience. However, it looks very promising. Dia stands out for its advanced integration of artificial intelligence into the user experience. This beta version is already highly ambitious, as it includes a veritable intelligent assistant, custom-developed by The Browser Company. This assistant can analyze entire web pages and provide contextualized advice and answers based on browsing history and the various tabs that are open. The idea is to be able to handle everything that's available online and in the browser with simple natural language commands. Dia is also capable of automatically performing certain specific tasks for you, based on the intent detected in your queries. The browser has been designed to perform a specific task, whether it's writing an email, comparing items on different shopping sites, answering specific questions about one of them, summarizing the content of a video or article opened in a tab, etc. Dia is therefore reimagining the browser, no longer as a medium for web pages, but as an intelligent assistant designed to facilitate everyday tasks without leaving the browser interface and therefore without necessarily needing to use services like ChatGPT. The icing on the cake is that The Browser Company promises that all personal data analyzed or used by its AI is stored locally and never shared. ChatGPT publisher OpenAI is also reportedly working on a web browser with advanced and intelligent features. – AFP Relaxnews
Time of India
a day ago
- Business
- Time of India
The Browser Company launches AI-first browser Dia in beta
The Browser Company has released its AI-powered web browser Dia in beta, marking a dramatic shift from traditional browsing toward artificial intelligence integration . The new browser positions AI as its core feature, allowing users to interact with an intelligent assistant directly through the address bar without visiting separate AI platforms like ChatGPT or Claude. Dia's standout capability lies in its seamless integration of AI functionality into everyday browsing tasks. Users can query information across all open tabs, generate drafts based on tab content, and receive web summaries through a built-in chatbot. The browser's address bar serves triple duty, handling website navigation, search queries, and AI interactions automatically based on user input. The launch comes after The Browser Company discontinued development of Arc browser last year, acknowledging that while Arc gained enthusiast popularity, its steep learning curve prevented mass adoption. CEO Josh Miller recognized that users increasingly rely on AI tools for various tasks, prompting the company to reimagine browsing entirely around artificial intelligence. Built on Google's open-source Chromium project, Dia maintains familiar browser functionality while adding advanced AI features. The "History" feature allows the AI to reference seven days of browsing data for contextual responses, while "Skills" enables users to create code snippets for customized shortcuts and layouts. Although AI integration in browsers isn't entirely new, Opera and Google Chrome offer similar features, Dia distinguishes itself by making artificial intelligence the central experience rather than an add-on feature. Current Arc users receive immediate access to Dia beta, with invitation privileges for other users. Interested users can join the waiting list through The Browser Company's website as the company prepares for broader public release. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Browser Company launches its AI-first browser, Dia, in beta
Traditional web tools are facing an existential crisis as AI products and tools increasingly eat up attention — and therefore market share and money — from a wide swathe of products that people have used for years to interact with the internet. At least, that's what The Browser Company seems to think is happening. The company last year decided to stop developing its popular web browser Arc, acknowledging that while Arc was popular among enthusiasts, it never hit scale as it presented too steep a learning curve to reach mass adoption. The startup has since been heads-down on developing a browser that bakes in AI at the heart of the browser. That browser, called Dia, is now available for use in beta, though you'll need an invite to try it out. The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller has of late acknowledged how people have been using AI tools for all sorts of tasks, and Dia is a reflection of that. By giving users an AI interface within the browser itself, where a majority of work is done these days, the company is hoping to slide into the user flow and give people an easy way to use AI, cutting out the need to visit the sites for tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. Up front, Dia presents a straightforward interface. The browser is based on Chromium, the open-source browser project backed by Google, so it has a familiar look and feel. The marquee feature here is the AI smarts, of course. Besides letting you type in website names and search terms, Dia's URL bar acts as the interface for its in-built AI chatbot. The bot can search the web for you, summarize files that you upload, and can automatically switch between chat and search functions. Users can also ask questions about all the tabs they have open, and the bot can even write up a draft based on the contents of those tabs. To set your preferences, all you have to do is talk to the chatbot to customize its tone of voice, style of writing, and settings for coding. Via an opt-in feature called History, you can allow the browser to use seven days of your browsing history as context to answer queries. Another feature called Skills lets you build small snippets of code that act as shortcuts to various settings. For example, you can ask the browser to build a layout for reading, and it'll code something up for you — think Siri shortcuts, but for your browser. Now, we have to note that chatbots in browsers are not a new feature at all. Several browser companies have integrated AI tools into their interfaces — for example, Opera Neon lets users use an AI agent to build mini-applications or complete tasks on their behalf, and Google is also adding AI-powered features to Chrome. The Browser Company says all existing Arc members will get access to Dia immediately, and existing Dia users will be able to send invites to other users. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Dia Browser Released — With AI That ‘Knows You Like A Friend'
The Browser Company has released Dia, arguably the first web browser to fully embrace AI. Dia is the successor to the short-lived Arc browser, which The Browser company has sidelined to focus on Dia. It's released in beta form today and will be made available to all Arc members, with others having to join a waitlist. While Arc made significant use of AI – building in features such as webpage summaries and previews of links before you've clicked them – Dia is described as an 'AI browser' with an almost exclusive focus on generative AI. Dia can answer questions on open browser tabs The Browser Company Dia's standout feature has similarities to the controversial Recall that is being built into Windows 11. The browser will remember your previous activity, allowing you to ask the AI to give you a summary of what you've been doing that week or even learn your writing style. 'With every tab that you open, it should feel like this AI model is getting more and more personalized to you, such that at the end of a week of browsing, a month of browsing, let alone a year, it's going to know you as well as your closest friends and colleagues," said Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company in a video introducing the browser. What's not immediately clear is how The Browser Company will secure that information. Microsoft's Recall became the subject of a security scandal when an early beta was found to be taking screenshots of personal information that could be accessed by hackers or malware. Microsoft fixed the problem before Recall was made available for general release. The Browser Company has released little detail about how it plans to secure the information stored by Dia, other than to say the feature is opt-in. Dia's AI assistant will also be able to read information open in any of your browser tabs. The company claims this solves one of the biggest problems of current AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini, where you must constantly cut and paste information back and forth from the browser. Instead, you'll be able to get the AI to instantly summarize a page or, say, write a response to a Gmail directly in the browser, without having to switch focus. The AI can even scan information stored in multiple tabs. Say, for example, you're buying a new car and have several tabs open with different models you're shortlisting. You'll be able to ask the AI to compare the features of the various cars by asking it to look at all the relevant tabs. The browser is also shipping with what the company calls 'skills'. Default skills included with the browser include Write (which helps you draft passages of text in your own voice) and Code (for help with programming). Skills can also be created to run bespoke tasks. For example, if you didn't want any of the sidebars to show on Facebook, just the main feed, you could ask the AI to make them disappear (this is similar to a feature that was already included in Arc). Skills can also be used to fill web forms with your personal information, for example filling out a job application by pointing the AI to a CV that is published online. While Dia is absolutely betting the farm on AI, other browser makers are certainly embracing it too. Microsoft has built its Copilot assistant into the Edge browser, while Opera has integrated ChatGPT and its own Aria AI into its software. Others remain more skeptical of AI. Vivaldi, for example, has eschewed built-in AI in favor of user privacy, while Firefox maker Mozilla has spoken out against Google's plans to build Gemini into its Chrome browser, arguing that it could harm browser competition. The Browser Company will simply be hoping that the Dia browser makes more of an impact than Arc, which was well received by reviewers, but didn't come close to disrupting the big beasts of the browser business.
The Verge
2 days ago
- Business
- The Verge
The Dia browser is a big bet on the web — and an even bigger bet on AI
Dia, the new browser from The Browser Company, is almost nothing like the company's last product. That app, Arc, was a total rethink of how browsers work: it moved tabs to the side and combined them with bookmarks, it offered endless ways to organize all your stuff, and it had lots of ideas about how to make your web surfing a little more delightful. Dia will get some of that stuff in time, The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller tells me. The app that's launching today for existing Arc users is very much still a beta (and only available on Mac). But none of that stuff is the point of Dia anyway. The point of Dia, he says, is to bring artificial intelligence to the very center of practically everything you do online. The app's central feature is a chat tool that is able to look at every website you visit, access every site you're logged into, and help you find information, get stuff done, and navigate the web a little more easily. The app itself, which I've been testing for a while, is incredibly simple to understand. Imagine Chrome, only with far more design polish and more playful animations. Now imagine a sidebar on the right side that contains a ChatGPT-like chatbot, which you can invoke at any time. You can use the chatbot to talk about the tab you're looking at, other tabs you have open, and even your browsing history. It can answer questions, find information, compile various things into a single thread, and more. Chrome with a chatbot. That's Dia. On purpose. 'As much as I personally loved Arc,' Miller says, 'I just couldn't ignore the data that said there was too much novelty for people to try it.' Arc data showed that once people got it, they were hooked, but most people never got it. 'When we started building Dia, the fact that it had horizontal tabs was not so much strategic as introspective. It was the right thing to do.' When I point out to Miller that spending your days nattering away with a chatbot is also a pretty novel thing, he stops me. That's the thing, he says: it's not. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing application in the history of the internet, the industry is already reorienting around chat, and talking to AI is already second nature among young people in particular. 'You talk to college students or high school students,' Miller says, 'and they are talking to this thing like a person.' Early Dia testers have, largely without guidance from The Browser Company, used its AI helper for meal planning, for study help, and for dating and friend advice. 'One of the things we're seeing is that a lot of people start with chat before they even start a project,' Miller says. 'Before they open an application, before they do Google searches, their first instinct is to open their computer and ask AI a question or for a plan.' Over the last year or so, even Miller has found himself leaning on AI chat more often and for more things. You can find this horrifying and dystopian if you want to — a small part of Miller might agree — but the trends don't lie. If you believe these AI relationships are both profound and inevitable, building a web browser around them makes perfect sense. This is becoming accepted wisdom: Perplexity is building a browser, OpenAI has long been reported to be doing so, and AI companies all over are lining up to buy Chrome if it ever goes up for sale. Google, meanwhile, is busy integrating Gemini into Chrome while it still can. When The Browser Company started, its big bet was that browsers matter more than we realized. Now, everyone has realized. There are three great reasons to build a browser for your AI. The first is simply that you can learn an awful lot about someone just by watching them browse the web. 'How does the system understand everything you're doing throughout the day?' says Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company's CTO. 'Where you click, where you type — how do you scrape all the pages you're looking at?' The Dia team found ways to quickly find and store the important bits of a website, as well as to discern which sites are relevant to you and which you'd rather never hear about again. All that data and history then feeds back into every chat interaction. Over time, Agrawal says, personalization has become Dia's most important feature. The browser's second big advantage is the URL bar. 'The most valuable thing in this new world,' Agrawal says, 'is the fact that the browser owns CMD-T and the omnibox, because that's the single entry point into your computer where you express intent — it's the most-used text box on your computer.' This is so true that one way the US government plans to break up Google's search monopoly is by forcing the company to sell Chrome, thus taking away the omnibox. Within Dia, every tab and window starts with an omnibox. If you type the name of a website, it should just take you there. If you type something that sounds like web search, you should get web search results. And if you ask for something an AI assistant can handle, it should bring up not just the assistant, but the right version of the assistant with the right data and skills required to help you get stuff done. Rather than try to build one all-purpose chatbot like Gemini, or ask you to choose between a million purpose-built models like ChatGPT, The Browser Company has invested a lot in what Agrawal calls 'the routing system.' Dia mostly doesn't run on its own models, and after months of trying, The Browser Company has given up on trying to compete in that space. Instead, the company is building what it calls 'skills' on top of existing models, helping combine prompts and models to match your needs to the right tools. 'And crucially,' Agrawal says, 'we can have custom UI and custom memory systems for each skill.' When you ask Dia to find you a coat, the assistant might activate a shopping skill, which knows all the stuff you've been looking at from Amazon and Anthropologie; when you ask it to draft an email, a writing skill can see both all the emails you've written and the authors you love reading. The Browser Company thinks of the skills system a bit like the iPhone's App Store, says head of product engineering Tara Feener. 'It's really about how do we unlock really specific value in the tasks and things you're already doing in the browser?' Right now, most AI systems want to be superapps, able to be all things for all people all the time. By being more specific and focused, Dia could do individual jobs better (and cheaper); by getting the routing system right, it could do all that and still feel seamless. Dia doesn't just see every webpage you visit — it can see everything in every site you're logged into. The third thing browsers have going for them is slightly less obvious but maybe even more powerful: cookies. Since Dia stores the cookies you get from every website on the web, it is effectively able to interact with all those websites on your behalf. That means Dia doesn't just see every webpage you visit — it can see everything in every site you're logged into. Right now, Agrawal says, Dia mostly uses cookies to grab more information from websites you visit, but it could do much more. Someday, in a future filled with AI agents that can browse the web and do stuff on your behalf, your browser becomes a powerful command center for all the bots. The Browser Company actually built a tool like this, Agrawal says. 'We used it extensively to book meetings, make reservations, all kinds of stuff you can do with your cookies.' The problem the team discovered was that the tech wasn't perfect, and people didn't like the feeling that their web browser was operating out of their control. For now, there's not much agency in Dia. But that'll change. With all that power, though, comes plenty of problems. The first is just the feeling that the browser gives you. The first time Dia makes you aware that it knows your social security number, because you typed it in once, is that going to read as helpful or horrifying? Your browser has always known a staggering amount about you, but never before has it reflected what it knows back to you so directly. Agrawal says The Browser Company has done a lot of work on figuring out which data — be it health, financial, or otherwise — is simply too important to be saved. And he hopes it'll never recite your social security number, even if it knows it. Agrawal is also careful to note that all your data is stored and encrypted on your computer. 'Whenever stuff is sent up to our service for processing,' he says, 'it stays up there for milliseconds and then it's wiped.' Arc has had a few security issues over time, and Agrawal says repeatedly that privacy and security have been core to Dia's development from the very beginning. Over time, he hopes almost everything in Dia can happen locally. So what does all this add up to? At first, Dia is a browser that lets you chat with your tabs. That's more or less Dia's marketing tagline, and it's the browser's main job for now. I've seen demos of Dia cross-referencing various job interview materials, across several tabs, to put together an overview of a person's performance. I've seen how you might use Dia to summarize Slack conversations and write replies of your own, or how it could help you examine a pull request in GitHub. Most of this isn't new stuff — it's just that the pieces are baked together, so you don't have to copy and paste, download and upload, or even take screenshots. The bot sees the browser, and vice versa. But in the long run, if Miller and The Browser Company are right about where AI is headed, your web browser could become much more than just a web browser. It could become the app that is with you everywhere, that knows you best, that can help you with anything. If that's the future, every company needs to race to be the app you start to build a relationship with, because the switching costs will be painful. Miller compares it to switching music apps, saying, 'There's a reason I've never switched to Apple Music, even though it works better in the Apple ecosystem. It just really does not know my music tastes in the way that Spotify has accumulated over time.' Dia, he hopes, will get better and more personalized every time you open a tab. And you eventually won't love your browser because of the way it works with tabs — you'll love it because of the way it works with you.
