The Recall Trial

Inspiration

We realised that both us and out peers spend way to much time doomscrolling on short form videos and we wanted to change that status quo.

What it does

The Recall Trial is a Chrome extension that interrupts your YouTube Shorts session, quizzes what you actually watched, and has ancient philosophers roast you with an AI generated receipt. Instead of blocking or lecturing, it uses humor to make you aware of your autopilot scrolling behavior.

How we built it

We built a Chrome extension using Manifest V3 that injects trial panels directly into YouTube Shorts. The backend runs on Next.js with OpenAI handling quiz generation, frame analysis, and roast receipts. The extension captures temporary frame screenshots and captions to build evidence for each session, which gets passed to the AI to generate personalized attention checks and a final philosopher verdict.

Challenges we ran into

Sleep deprivation hit hard, especially since this was the first hackathon that most of us attended. Getting accurate video analysis through screenshots was tricky since we could not directly access video content. At multiple points everything broke at once. The quiz generation kept falling back to hardcoded defaults because the evidence pipeline was not feeding the AI enough useful context to generate real questions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the full loop working: from Shorts detection, to the philosopher jumpscare, to AI quizzes, to a personalized roast receipt. The humor landed the way we hoped.

What we learned

That screenshot based video analysis is much harder than it sounds, and that building a Chrome extension has a lot of hidden complexity. Also that sleep is load bearing.

What's next for The Recall Trial

Expanding to TikTok and Instagram Reels, improving the video analysis pipeline for more accurate quiz generation, and adding shareable receipt cards so users can post their philosopher roasts.