Factigator

Inspiration

Honestly? I’ve had it with misinformation. It’s exhausting to see it spread all over social media and even harder to deal with it in real life—debating with friends or family, digging through the internet to figure out who’s actually right. I wanted a better way to just… cut through the noise and get to the facts.

What it does

Factigators sole purpose is to query multiple sources of truth on topics of the users choice to find relevant facts with sources. The idea is that misinformation can be squashed if we have readily available facts.

How we built it

We built Factigator to leverage LLM service providers such as OpenAI as well as local LLMs via the Ollama platform, and to query sources such as Google's Fact Checking Tool, among others. One major capability is the ability for users to add their own sources of truth to the tool. In support of this hackathon we have added Google's newest AI API functions as well, so that Chrome can leverage its native connectivity to Googles LLMs.

Challenges we ran into

Major challenges were getting the functionality that would traditionally be deployed as a dedicated server/service into the browser itself, not to mention the ability to leverage multiple LLM providers and multiple sources of truth. Factigator pushes the boundaries of what is possible in the browser itself, while maintaining manifest V3 compliance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Innovating in this space. Leveraging capabilities no one has thought to integrate yet. The biggest win here is creating something genuinely useful. It feels good knowing this tool can help cut through the chaos of misinformation. And the fact that it’s free? That’s important to me. Everyone should have access to solid facts without a paywall in the way.

What we learned

When I started working on this solution I had never made a browser extension before. I come from an enterprise solution scale background. Tackling this challenge has really given me insight into not only make better extensions, but also how to port functionality that would typically be deployed in a more traditional server/service format into a portable browser executable.

What's next for Factigator

The sky is the limit. Not only are we planning on expanding the feature sets but also exploring porting its capabilities to other browser formats. At the end of the day its a civil service. Everyone should have access to the Truth.

Built With

• google-fact-check
• gpt-4o
• javascript
• langchain
• llama3.2
• rss