As every part of our lives is becoming drenched in AI, it only makes sense that a web browser, a tool we use every day, will need AI to stay ahead in the race, too. Especially since Microsoft introduced Bing Chat to Edge, this race has intensified. And every browser is scurrying to keep up.
Arc Browser has also jumped the bandwagon with a suite of features known as Arc Max. Among other things, like Ask ChatGPT in the Command Bar, Tidy Up Downloads, Tidy Page Titles, and 5-second page reviews/ summaries, there's a feature called 'Ask on Page'.
Ask on Page uses AI to answer any question from the content on the page. It uses Claude from Anthropic to answer your questions. Anthropic is the other half of the two eggs in the AI basket – OpenAI's foremost rival. All the other features in the Arc Max bundle are powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
When you choose to use Arc Max features, data is sent over to the corresponding AI partner. So, when you choose to use 'Ask on Page', data will be sent to Anthropic. This data involves the content of the page and the page URL.
Enable Ask on Page
Before you can use Ask on Page, you need to enable it, as the AI features aren't enabled by default. If you previously enabled Arc Max on your Arc Browser, you can skip this step.
To enable Ask on Page, follow these steps:
- Press
Cmd
+T
from the keyboard and type 'Max'. Then, select the 'Open Max Preferences' result.
Next, you can either enable all Arc Max features by clicking 'Turn on Max' or you can simply enable 'Ask on Page' by turning on its toggle.
Using Ask on Page
Once you've enabled the feature, using it is easy. It doesn't require anything else from your end. You don't need to create an account on Claude to use the feature either.
- To use Ask on Page, press the
Cmd
+F
keyboard shortcut. - The 'Find or Ask' toolbar will appear in the top-right corner. If you simply want to find something on the webpage, the feature works like the 'Find' feature in any other web browser.
Type what you're looking for, and if it exists on the page, Arc will highlight it. You can then use the up and down arrows to move to other instances where the word/ phrase appears.
- But if it doesn't exist, an 'Ask' option will appear. You can type any question and send it to the AI by pressing 'Enter' or clicking on 'Ask', and it will read the content of the page and (try to) answer it.
- If it finds the information, it'll quote it directly as well as provide you with an answer as well. You can also click 'Find on Page' to navigate there.
- Unfortunately, in my testing, it wasn't perfect. While it answered one question perfectly, for another, it insisted that the information didn't exist on the page.
However, when I quoted the information I was requesting, it apologized for missing that detail.
All in all, it's quite impressive if somewhat unreliable. As the AI improves over time, you can use the feature to get information from long pages quickly, even when you don't know the exact words/ phrases you're looking for.
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