Apa | Devpost

Inspiration

Inspired by the reveal charm Aparecium in Harry Potter, which can show the hidden content on a parchment.

It's quite like when we read articles and papers on web, we may meet a word that we don't understand. That is the time when we need a magic charm to show us what it means, just by moving our magic wand.

What it does

Apa helps explainning words on web page as a browser extension, it can give you the detailed meanings of the word, using easy-understanding content.

All you need to do is open the side panel and select text, Apa will do the rest.

You can also customize your experience by abundant config, such as output length, translations and so on.

How we built it

Using Prompt API provided by Chrome built-in Gemini Nano，give a system prompt to ask LLM to explain a word.

Also used Language detector API and translator API to fit different language need.

The UI interface is constructed by vite + shadcn-vue, building and bundling into side panel directory of the extension.

Challenges we ran into

For context understanding, the prompt turns more and more complex, which in turn caused bad generate quality. So I have to roll back to the simple version. But I believe that there must be a way the complex prompt can work. Still working on it.

Output in specific structure also could be tricky, it seems like the model has its own strategy about organizing the structure. Still, the simpler the better for now.