Opera’s Neon browser has three AI bots and one chaotic brain

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Opera’s new AI browser, Neon, isn’t just another ChatGPT-in-a-browser situation. 

It’s a full-blown AI commune, three bots, one browser, all trying (and sometimes failing) to help you surf the web smarter. 

The trio, Chat, Do, and Make, is meant to tag-team your browsing experience. 

The result? A fascinating, occasionally chaotic experiment in what happens when your browser develops too much personality.

Opera started rolling out Neon last month, entering an already packed crowd of AI-powered browsers like Chrome’s Gemini experiment, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia. 

Unlike its rivals, though, Opera wants you to pay $19.90 a month for Neon, a bold move in a world where browsers are famously free.

At first glance, Neon looks like any other Opera product: slick interface, built-in VPN and ad blocker, and a sidebar full of social apps. 

But front and center are its AI modes. 

A small toggle lets you choose between four settings: a normal search, Chat (a chatbot), Do (an agent that literally clicks around the web for you), and Make (a creative bot that builds web tools).

Chat is the talkative one, maybe too talkative. It can summarize web pages and answer questions, but it sometimes invents details or writes essays when you only wanted a sentence. 

When it flubbed a simple comment count on The Verge’s stories, Opera’s exec said we’d used the wrong bot. Apparently, Do was the right one for that job.

Do is the “I got this” bot that takes over your browser. It can book appointments or shop for you, sometimes impressively, sometimes disastrously. 

One test ended with Do buying a funeral wreath instead of a bouquet. It’s also a bit of a control freak; once it starts, there’s no interrupting it mid-task.

Then there’s Make, the artsy sibling that can spin up little tools and games in a sandbox environment. 

The Verge asked it for a simple Spanish memory game, and it delivered, a bit clunky, but surprisingly functional.

Opera’s hoping Neon’s Cards system, prewritten AI prompts, will become the next big app ecosystem. For now, though, it’s mostly gimmicks and Yoda impressions.

Neon feels more like a quirky AI intern than a polished assistant: enthusiastic, unpredictable, and always learning. 

At $20 a month, it’s a pricey experiment, but one that hints at a weird, wonderful future where your browser doesn’t just surf the web, it thinks it’s your coworker.