proDUCKtive

Inspiration

While brainstorming project ideas, we realized how hard it is to stay focused without something or someone keeping us accountable. That’s when the idea for a small, cheerful duck companion was born. What started as a fun concept quickly turned into a passion project to make productivity feel supportive, not stressful!

What it does

proDUCKtive is a Chrome extension that tracks your browsing activity and helps you stay focused with the help of your duck companion. It classifies websites as productive or unproductive automatically, however user also can add and remove their own websites to the lists. It monitors your active time and detects inactivity. When you start procrastinating, your duck will quack at you bringing you back to focus. At the end of a session, Gemini AI summarizes your day’s focus patterns and highlights your most productive streaks.

How we built it

Frontend (Popup UI): HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a dark-mode UI/UX. Background Service Worker: Tracks site activity, records time spent, and calls Gemini’s Generative Language API to create summaries. Gemini API: Powers the AI productivity report and natural-language summaries. Chrome Storage: Persists user preferences, website lists, and generated summaries locally. Manifest v3: Ensures compatibility with Chrome’s latest extension framework.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges were managing inactivity detection and tab focus tracking across multiple browser windows and handling Chrome extension messaging between the background script and popup reliably.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of successfully integrated real-time productivity detection and AI summarization in a compact Chrome extension. Additionally the design of the “Productivity Duck” which made productivity gamified and fun

What we learned

We learned how to structure a Chrome extension using Manifest V3 and service workers. We also learned how to connect to Gemini’s Generative Language API and format requests/responses.