Snappage

A chrome extension to easily summarize papers and required readings!

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Inspiration

It was an ordinary day, like any other. I was walking up the hill when I got a dreaded email from my tech management class. Checking my phone, my frolicking came to an end as I read: "Homework 3 has been posted-- please read chapter 1.2 of the textbook!"

To most, this would be nothing noteworthy. However, for someone like me who has the attention span and the memory of a newborn fish, I was aghast. That's when I thought-- wow, this would be so much easier if I had a chrome extension that would easily summarize my papers and textbooks! Like the snapshot of a page.

And thus, there was the lore behind "Snappage".

What it does

First the user highlights any amount of text on their screen. They then click the extension and "summarize", and it will output a short summary of what you've highlighted.

How I built it

With the indomitable will of the human spirit.

Challenges I ran into

I'd previously never made a chrome extension before, nor did I know at all how to actually implement the summarization of the text.

So actually testing and styling the chrome extension was a bit of a challenge, but the real pain in the butt for me was trying to summarize the text-- I knew there were things like hugging face transformers that could do it for you, but trying to link python scripts to my JS app was a huge headache. I then looked into actually just straight implementing an algorithm in JS, but things like TextRank were often inaccurate. Also, I originally wanted to have the extension just straight summarize EVERYTHING on the page, but I was unable to figure out how to identify the topmost HTML container of the site, which led to a couple hours of pain before I just decided to go with selection.

Also I was originally gonna do this with 2 other people but they both bailed so instead of an interactive experience all working on various features and helping each other out, my hackathon was more just me sitting alone in a lounge at 3AM painfully debugging.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Making it
  • Having it actually sort of work with most use cases

What I learned

  • How to make a chrome extension
  • Making a chrome extension is tuff
  • Summarizing text is actually more annoying to implement in practice than in theory
  • Hacking alone is actually ok and you learn a lot, but god forbid you run into an issue you can't debug because you're on your own, buddy.

What's next for Snappage

  • Deployment to the chrome store
  • Diversifying into AI summarization that's more accurate and legit
  • Creating the next ChatGPT
  • Taking over the world
  • Probably some rest for the creator

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