Opera Mini for iOS Gets AI-Powered News Feed in India, Select Other Countries

Global tech firm Opera Software on Tuesday rolled out a new version of its mobile browser app Opera Mini for iPhone and iPad users in India that has artificial intelligence (AI)-powered news feed. Apart from English, the news feed is available in Gujarati, Hindi, and Tamil for Indian users.

The revamped UI of Opera Mini for iOS features the AI-based news feed on its start page which, the company claims, renders news four times faster than the previous version. The news feed is powered by the GBDT (gradient boosting decision trees) machine learning algorithm and deep neural network (DNN) learning.

In a statement, Opera explains, "Once the user starts engaging with news content, it will begin defining a unique user profile by accumulating news categories and publisher domains the user clicks on. The news engine analyzes the user's interest through a deep learning model that understands what each user is engaged with. The more the user engages with the newsfeed, the more in-tune the content becomes for the user within the 'For You' section."

"The goal is to provide each user the ability to get their optimal content based on their interest, which is constantly evolving," said Cuautemoc Weber, Head of Global Accounts and Content, Opera Software, in a statement. "This is also applied to bringing new information which perhaps the user would not have been able to gather from their traditional sources," Weber added.

The app will allow users to customise the news feed with international news sources by setting location and categories as per their choice.

The feature is also available in select countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States. The company plans to further extend it to Russia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Written with inputs from IANS