TimeZoner

Inspiration

Don't you always hate it when you see a time in a different time zone that you've never even heard of before, and you have to search up how to convert it into your local time? I do, and that's why I decided to create this Chrome extension to remedy that issue.

With TimeZoner, communication and collaboration across the world is made simpler as people can easily set up times to get together without having to worry about time zones.

What it does

TimeZoner automatically detects times (in common formats such as HH:MM, H:MM, HH:MM:SS..) on websites and also the time zone that a website has listed for its times (if possible, through keywords such as CST or NZST), and then converts the times into the user's local time zone, which can be edited by clicking on the extension's icon.

How we built it

TimeZoner was built via Visual Studio Code follow Google's guide on extension development. It was tested on several websites, but it does not work for every one.

Challenges we ran into

While it was originally planned to incorporate machine learning and NLP into the code (such as spaCy's token classification to detect times and BERT's Q&A capabilities to detect the time zone), it became too difficult to easily and efficiently add in these features.

The extension also has several known issues, and does not work on every site. It is possible that it could break some sites upon loading in, but time constraints have left it in an unfinished state.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

TimeZoner supports several major time zones, and can detect almost any standard format of time (through regular expressions).

This has been my first time creating a Chrome extension, and I have found the process thoroughly insightful.

What we learned

I've been able to learn a bit more about some functionalities of NLP and ML, and mainly gained experience in developing my first Chrome extension.

What's next for TimeZoner

In the future, more time zones could be added and known issues could be fixed.

The Github repository for the extension can be found here. If you wish to run the extension, unzip the folder and follow this tutorial.

Built With

• css
• html5
• javascript
• visual-studio-code