SummarEase

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  chrome extension summarizing a biography on oppenheimer

Inspiration

When I research something, it takes an immense amount of time to synthesize all the information that I am bombarded with. I open the first of many links that Google shows me, and I am shown a huge article with an overwhelming amount of information. I wondered if there was any way for me to know the overall gist of the website, without having to spend the time to read the whole thing. So, I made SummarEase.

What it does

SummarEase is your research assistant. It reads long webpages for you and summarizes the content into a short paragraph, making your research much easier and faster.

How we built it

SummarEase has two main components.

First, the frontend which is developed as a Chrome Extension. It is built using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. The frontend accesses the user’s active tab’s URL and sends it to the backend.

The backend is built using Python. It exposes an API to the frontend. The Python code scrapes the active tab’s URL using BeautifulSoup4 to get all the content. Then it sends the content to ChatGPT using the OpenAI API. The backend returns a summary to the frontend. The Chrome Extension then shows this to the user!

Challenges we ran into

It was very hard to find up-to-date documentation on the development of a Chrome Extension, especially regarding permissions and access rights for the extension. It was also my first time using JavaScript so I had to learn it.

Even in the Python API, I faced some issues with passing a URL as a parameter as it required URL encoding and decoding. I even had to figure out how to expand my webscaper to a variety of pages because websites use different HTML formats.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that I could make a seamless, end-to-end software by myself. I also believe that this software is actually useful for me and my friends in our daily lives. I am also proud that I could make a Chrome Extension without much prior knowledge of HTML or JavaScript.

What we learned

This project was very complex and required several components. I learned how to break the bigger problem down into smaller pieces. I understood how to research and develop each separate component, and then stitch them together into one final product. Through this project, I learned a lot of new technical skills too. I learned how to web scrape using BeautifulSoup4 in Python, how to deploy a Python API using Flask and Google Cloud Platform, and most importantly, how to create a Chrome Extension.

What's next for SummarEase

Firstly, I would love to expand SummarEase to more dynamic and complex websites. I also want to make SummarEase more interactive. Instead of only providing the user with a summary, the user could have the choice to ask follow up questions regarding the content on the webpage.

Built With

• beautifulsoup4
• chatgpt
• css
• flask
• google-cloud
• html
• javascript
• openai
• python