SPEED UP YOUR WEB BROWSING & SEARCHES
Summarise the content of web pages
Save time when browsing lengthy web pages by asking AI to summarise the key points for you. All the main browserbased AI assistants o er this feature, including Copilot in Edge (www.snipca. com/51129), Leo in Brave (www.snipca. com/51130) and Aria in Opera (www. snipca.com/51131). Simply click or type ‘Generate page summary’ (see screenshot below), ‘Summarise this page’ or similar – in Opera, press Ctrl+/ (forward slash) and switch to Aria’s Page Context mode.
To use CHATGPT (https://chatgpt.com) or Google Gemini (www.snipca.com/51132) instead, open the assistant in a new tab and paste the URL of the page you want to summarise. Be wary of the hundreds of dodgy CHATGPT extensions in the Chrome Web Store (see box on page 55).
Once the chatbot has provided its summary, you can ask follow-up questions about the content – or select a question it suggests. Copilot and Leo can even summarise PDFS you view in the browser, and the latter also analyses Google Docs and Sheets files.
Summarise the content of Youtube videos
Equally useful is AI’S ability to summarise Youtube videos, if you don’t have time to watch the whole clip or you just want to check specific information. Copilot and Leo can both perform this time-saving feature, provided the video has a transcript – which is itself generated from the video’s closed captions.
CHATGPT can’t currently summarise Youtube videos, but you can beat this restriction by installing the (reliable) extension ‘Youtube Summary with CHATGPT & Claude’ (www.snipca. com/51120). This provides both full transcripts of videos, which appear next to them on Youtube ( 1 in screenshot above right), and bullet-pointed summaries that open in a new CHATGPT tab – click Summarize Video 2.
To view Youtube summaries in Google Gemini, first go to its Extensions page (www.snipca.com/51121) and switch on the Youtube option. Paste the video URL into a Gemini chat and ask the assistant to summarise.
Organise your browser tabs
Earlier this year, Google added several AI features to Chrome – but only in the US. One of them organises your tabs into themed groups, so they’re easier to find when you have a lot open. Right-click a tab, then select Organise Similar Tabs and the browser’s new AI tool will add them to suitably named groups.
To get the feature now, install the Ai-powered extension TABGPT (www. snipca.com/51124) – you don’t need a CHATGPT account to use it. Pin it to your toolbar, then click its button and select ‘Classify My Tabs’ (see screenshot below). TABGPT will use AI to sort your tabs into themed groups – the default options are News, Shopping and Youtube, but you can add more in the extension’s Settings.
Edge o ers a similar feature through its Copilot assistant. Type ‘Organise my tabs’ to sort your tabs into groups, then click ‘Group tabs’ to accept its suggestions.
Search web pages faster
One of the most useful new AI options in Edge has nothing to do with Copilot, but instead improves the browser’s ‘Find on page’ feature. When you press Ctrl+f and enter a word, phrase or name you don’t spell correctly, the updated search tool uses AI to guess what you mean.
It provides ‘Also found’ suggestions below the search box, which you can click to view matching results on the page. ‘Find on page’ may also suggest synonyms for your query, for example ‘encrypted’ and ‘protected’ when you type ‘secure’ (see screenshot above).
If you don’t see these suggestions, you can enable the option manually. Type edge://flags into Edge’s address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Find the entry Related matches for find on page, select Enabled in its dropdown menu and restart the browser.
Scour the web with an AI search engine
Google, Bing and Brave Search now include Ai-generated results alongside ‘real’ ones, but several new search engines rely entirely on AI. The most impressive is Perplexity (www.perplexity. ai), which scours ‘top-tier’ online sources to provide concise but informative answers to your queries, then lets you ask follow-up questions (see screenshot below)
It’s much faster and more focused and up-to-date than CHATGPT, and is immune to the SEO tricks that push poor-quality pages to the top of Google search results. Perplexity is free to use, but has a paid– for Pro plan priced at $20 (£15.80) a month that “goes deeper into the specifics of your question”.