I’m wondering if anyone knows about development of intelligent web automation tools that could work more like actual people. Right now I use regular automation but it breaks whenever websites change or popup windows appear unexpectedly. What I really need is something that can understand what I’m trying to accomplish on a webpage and figure out how to do it even when things don’t go as planned. It should be able to handle unexpected dialogs, adapt when page layouts change, and maybe even learn from previous runs. The ideal tool would run continuously without needing constant maintenance. Has anyone heard of projects working on this kind of smart browser automation? I keep hitting walls with current solutions when sites update their structure or add new elements.
This tech is already happening with AI browser automation tools. Anthropic and others are building systems that understand natural language and navigate sites intelligently. There are experimental frameworks using computer vision and ML to identify page elements semantically instead of relying on fragile selectors. Problem is these solutions are expensive to run - they need serious computational power for AI processing. I tested an early version last month. It handled layout changes better than traditional automation but was slower and sometimes guessed wrong about clickable elements. Shows promise but we’re probably 1-2 years out from reliable production solutions that can actually think through complex scenarios like humans do.
Microsoft’s AI integration in Edge shows where this tech is going. The real challenge isn’t just making browsers smarter - it’s building systems that actually understand web interfaces contextually. I’ve worked with automation frameworks, and the breakthrough will happen when these tools grasp page semantics instead of just DOM structure. Current research focuses on LLMs that can look at screenshots and figure out what actions to take. Google’s testing multimodal AI that processes both visual and text content from webpages at the same time. Cost and latency are still the main roadblocks - running heavy AI models for every browser action just isn’t practical yet for most apps. But hybrid approaches that mix traditional automation with AI for tricky edge cases are already looking promising in beta tests.
puppeteer and playwright are integrating ai models for this. saw some demos with gpt-4 vision that analyzed page screenshots n decided which elements to interact with. cool part? it doesn’t rely on weak css selectors - it actually ‘sees’ the page like we do. still early days tho, and those api calls can be pricey.