Simplify

Simplify in action!
Summary API
A Successful Installation of the Extension

Inspiration

The advent of the 21st century has ushered in the information era. Our race has evolved to process mountains of information every day. However, the attention spans of future generations are steadily decreasing. To combat this, we have created Simplify, an innovative tool that allows humans to process large amounts of information at lightning speeds.

What it does

Simplify pulls the URL of the user's current page, reads the text, and condenses the information into 5 sentences. Simplify is a Chrome Extension that summarizes any article you're reading in just one click!

How we built it

On a high level, the Chrome Extension calls on an API that was made and deployed on Herkou to get the summary of the article.

Chrome Extension

the Chrome Extension was built using HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript
the extension grabs the URL of the site and sends a GET request to the API, passing in the URL as the value of the query string
A summary of the article is returned, which is displayed on the extension

API

the API was built using Flask and newspaper3k
the endpoint of the API is https://summary-api-zzranger.herokuapp.com/query?article=`{articleUrl}` with {articleURL} as the article link
API receives a query string containing the URL of the article
Article is downloaded and processed by newspaper3k
A summary of the article is returned in the form of a JSON file

Challenges we ran into

C O R S: we struggled to integrate the Flask API with the Chrome Extension due to CORS
Text Summarization Model: we had some difficulty finding and setting up a good text summarization model

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned how to make a chrome extension
We made & deployed an API using flask
We can summarize any article on the internet :)

What's next for Simplify

We would like to train a better model to create more coherent summaries. We'd also like to add a feature that allows users to customize the length of their summary.