What you need to know
- Brave, best known for its Chromium-based web browser now has its own AI tools built into its search engine.
- Summarizer, powered by Brave AI, will provide a smart summary of information at the top of search based on the question asked.
- It's enabled by default on desktop and mobile but users can opt out in settings.
Bing Chat has been occupying much of the AI discussion of late but, naturally, other competing products are starting to jump on it as well. Brave, best known for its Chromium-based web browser has its own search engine and quietly slipped out a new AI-powered tool it calls Summarizer.
It does exactly as the name implies. Using Brave AI, Summarizer will display a concise summary of information based on your input.
"The Summarizer provides concise and to-the-point answers at the top of Brave Search results pages, in response to the user’s input, solely based on Web search results. Unlike a purely generative AI model, which is prone to spout unsubstantiated assertions, we trained our large language models (LLMs) to process multiple sources of information present on the Web. This produces a more concise, accurate answer, expressed in coherent language."
It's a little more basic in its implementation than Bing Chat AI, but it does seem to work. I've been playing around with it a little and for the most part, the results have been pretty good. Because it's using web results, though, if you ask about people, you can easily get multiple different answers strung together like in the image above. At least it got the right Daniel Rubino in there first. It couldn't find anything on Jez Corden though, unlike Bing Chat.
But it's also dependent on being able to find the right answers, too. Brave Search has been getting better and better since its inception, but in my experience still lags behind Google and Bing substantially at times. One example is that I asked it when the longest day of the year is, and Summarizer could only pull a result for 2022.
But if you're using Brave, it's definitely a neat addition. I've been using it in Brave browser for some time, but often find the top results don't deliver the answer I actually want. Summarizer has certainly been more useful in that regard, but there are still plenty of topics it doesn't seem to be able to produce answers for.
Summarizer is enabled by default but users can opt out in settings if they'd rather not use it. It's obviously early days and will surely get better and better, but if you'd like to try it out for yourself simply hit search.brave.com in your browser.
