Meridian

Inspiration

Meridian was inspired by our families and the challenges they face navigating an internet built for the fluent and the tech-savvy. From unclear instructions to overwhelming layouts, even simple tasks can become frustrating barriers to understanding.

Meridian was created to chart a clearer path through that noise. It bridges the gap between what appears on a screen and what it truly means, helping users interpret and act on information with confidence, independence, and ease.

Like its namesake, Meridian offers steady lines that guide users when they feel lost online. It doesn’t just process information. It listens, learns, and truly understands what you mean.

What it does

Meridian helps users navigate the web through intelligent semantic features that bring clarity, context, and direction to online information. Its core capabilities include:

1. Smart Chat – Empowers users to have natural conversations with Google’s built-in AI about any webpage. Meridian understands the context of what’s on screen and can pinpoint information, explain meaning, and generate a guided, step-by-step interactive walkthrough to help users complete what they came to do with confidence.

2. Smart Match Widget – A lightweight on-page guide that identifies and highlights sections of a website semantically related to a user’s question or phrase, even when the wording differs. It’s built to recognize what users mean, not just what they type.

3. Explain in Context – Lets users highlight text and instantly receive clear, simple explanations of difficult terms through a tooltip. The same capability extends to PDFs via Meridian’s custom-built viewer, ensuring that complex document content remains understandable in any format.

Each feature was designed to restore semantic context where webpages often fall short, making information more meaningful, approachable, and actionable. They support an online environment where understanding feels natural, not forced.

How we built it

Meridian’s intelligence is powered by Google’s Prompt API, with Gemini Embeddings and IndexedDB enabling fast, local-first contextualization of webpages. Firebase supports communication with Gemini for the Smart Chat and Smart Match Widget features, ensuring seamless interaction between the user and our AI architecture.

Challenges we ran into

Building Meridian meant finding the right balance between depth, precision, and speed—while keeping everything lightweight and accessible. Feeding entire webpages into Gemini Nano wasn’t feasible, so we drew inspiration from RAG techniques to preserve meaning without sacrificing performance.

Instead of processing every word, Meridian analyzes key semantic elements like links, headers, and section hierarchies to capture a webpage’s conceptual framework. Each page is represented through these embeddings, stored locally to maintain privacy and improve efficiency. When users query a page, Meridian matches their request against these local embeddings to return the most contextually relevant results.

To maintain performance, Meridian uses a logical cache that maps tabs to search sessions, clearing inactive data as needed. PDFs posed a unique challenge since they don’t support content scripts, leading us to design a custom viewer specifically for semantic contextualization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Meridian brings together semantic search, contextual understanding, and local-first AI in a single, lightweight browser extension. It helps users find information on their own terms and understand it.

By seamlessly handling both web and PDF content, Meridian expands what accessibility can mean in digital spaces. Its architecture balances speed, privacy, and clarity, allowing complex AI reasoning to happen quietly in the background so the user experience remains simple, intuitive, and empowering.

What's next for Meridian

Meridian’s next evolution will introduce multi-language support, making it an even more inclusive tool for users around the world. Our broader vision is to shape a web that feels semantically transparent, one where users can communicate naturally, explore intuitively, and understand not just what is written, but what it truly means to them.

We believe that everyone deserves to be seen and understood. As Meridian evolves, it strives to be a constant line of understanding, helping users navigate the web not as a maze of pages, but as a map of meaning.

Built With

• built-in-ai-api
• css
• dexie.js
• firebase
• gemini-embeddings-api
• html
• indexed-db
• javascript
• pdfjs-dist
• vite