Brevity

Inspiration

Managing a messy inbox can be tedious and stressful. Through our own experiences both at UNC and in the developer workplace, we were overwhelmed. However, we knew that there could be a more efficient solution to email management. This was the conception of Brevity.

What it does

Brevity is a chrome extension that programmatically ranks your emails based on their urgency and importance. Additionally, Brevity provides a short summary of each email, captured by only a few sentences.

How we built it

Brevity was built using a suite of technologies including OpenAI's GPT3 model, React, Tailwind, Javascript, etc. For the frontend, we started by storyboarding our design, implementing our design in React, and ultimately integrating the GPT3 API to create visual indicators and summarize email contents. For the backend, we began by implementing an OAuth flow to connect to Gmail, and built wrappers for the GPT3 API. We decided to package it as a Chrome extension as it provided a good middle ground between the accessibility of a website and the power of a standalone application.

Challenges we ran into

A few challenges we ran into include:

Google's Sentiment Analysis API was not very accurate or comprehensive, so we had to pivot mid project to GPT3 to rate the urgency of emails.
All of the OAuth Client Side SDKs we tried to use weren't meant to be used with Chrome extensions, so we had to build our own.
Properly querying GPT3 took a lot of trial and error to get it to produce the exact responses we wanted.
We had to optimize our API calls so we wouldn't exceed OpenAI's limits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud that we were able to turn Brevity into a reality. Despite the sheer scope and complexity of Brevity's technology, we persevered and learned so much in order to build something meaningful.

What we learned

A few things we learned:

The inner workings of OAuth and interfacing with login flows
To not accidentally publish our API keys to GitHub
The power of GPT3 and how to effectively utilize it
How to use version control with a team to effectively collaborate in real time

What's next for Brevity

We really wanted to have Outlook functionality as well, but unfortunately couldn't get it working and polished in time. As for what's next, we look forward to providing Outlook functionality alongside Gmail.

Built With

Submitted to

HackNC 2022
- Winner HackNC General - 2nd Place

Created by

I worked on the frontend, design philosophy and presentation/pitch. Learned the true struggle of building React components simultaneously within a team.

Benjamin Goulet
I worked on the front-end, designing the UI to make sure that it is easy-to-use and beautiful. Converted several Figma components into React components.

Farouk Charkas
I worked on the front-end and contributed to the user experience by using React and Tailwind CSS to bring our Figma design to life. I developed a method to convert all email data stored locally in Chrome into dynamically rendered React components.

Emerson Hicks
https://bongodev.cc
I worked on back-end, had to learn the pain of manually implementing OAuth flows, dealt with CORS, got angry with CORS, but ultimately prevailed over CORS.

Noah Smith