Homer, your homie

Meet Homer, a content-writing, summarizing and translating browser extension.

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Inspiration

As we came across the Gemini Hackathon on Twitter, we had a Eureka moment to create Homer. What if users could use a lightweight extension to help them rewrite, summarize and translate text. And so, we decided to participate in the Hackathon to build the same.

What it does

Homer is a lightweight browser extension that can rewrite, summarize or translate text. Users can select text on a webpage, right-click to actionize Homer and then work with the extension to help them out.

How we built it

We built Homer using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Utilizing the Gemini Nano APIs provided by chrome, we integrated the prompt api, summarize api and the translate api and exposed their capabilities to users in a clean and friendly UI.

Challenges we ran into

  1. It's not easy to activate Gemini Nano capabilities on chrome, so we had to spend time in doing this.
  2. Language detection is not working on developer machines; hence we had to exclude this from our integration.
  3. Translator API does not translate for certain languages mentioned in https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/translator-api, hoping that this can be fixed soon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the extension as a whole. Rewriting, summarizing and translating are working fast and gives good results. We are also proud of the fact that we decided to go with a popup instead of a side panel. Making the UX less cumbersome and more lightweight.

What we learned

This is the first time the team is creating a chrome extension, so that was a good learning experience. We also learnt that providing features is one thing but providing features that are consistent and scalable is a whole different ball game.

What's next for Homer, your homie

  1. We want to utilize the language detector api and the translator api functionalities that seem to be non-functional at this point. With this we will be able to dynamically detect the language of the selected text and can give users options to translate into various languages (a bigger set).
  2. We want to publish the extension to the chrome-store, due to time-constraints we probably won't be able to do it before the hackathon deadline, but we will publish it, nonetheless.

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