News insight

An extension to rebuild critical thinking and create language aware individuals by going beyond simple summarization through proactively flagging persuasive language and weak sourcing in real-time.

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Inspiration

I got tired of getting my opinions (and also that of my friends) steered by writers and outlets with agendas and subtle mind controlling attempts through carefully crafted articles. "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth" ~ Garry Kasparov

What it does

Context menu and highlighting was implemented for ubiquitous and easy use if the features.

Proactive Language Highlighting: Automatically scans the text of articles and underlines phrases that may represent:

Loaded & Emotional Language: Words designed to provoke an emotional response.

Absolutes & Generalizations: Sweeping statements that are often unprovable.

Weak or Vague Sources: Citing unnamed "experts" or "sources."

Context Menu for Text Selection: When you highlight any text on a page and right-click, you get the following options:

Proofread: Checks the selected text for grammatical errors and suggests corrections.

Summarize: Generates a concise summary of the selected text, which appears in a tooltip when you hover over it.

Rewrite: Replaces the selected text with an improved version, showing the original text in a tooltip.

Advanced Context Menu for Images: When you right-click on an image, a multi-option "Analyse Image" menu appears, allowing you to ask the AI to analyze it from different perspectives:

Analyze for Persuasive Bias: (Media Literacy Expert) Looks at camera angles, lighting, and focus to determine the intended emotional effect.

Analyze for Missing Context: (Photojournalist) Considers what might be happening outside the frame that could change the image's meaning.

Analyze for Symbolism: (Art Historian) Interprets the symbolic meaning of elements within the image, especially for cartoons or artwork.

Analyze Chart/Graph: (Data Analyst) Objectively states what the data shows and identifies any potentially misleading aspects of the visualization.

Analyze for Emotions: (Emotional Intelligence Expert) Describes the mood of the scene and identifies the emotions of people based on non-verbal cues.

Popup Window Features (Main UI)

These features are available when you click the extension's icon in the Chrome toolbar. The popup is organized into several tabs:

Critical Thinking Tab: Generate Questions: Reads the article and generates a list of 3-5 critical thinking questions to help you engage with the content more deeply and question its premises.

Summary Tab: Generate Summary: Provides a clean, bulleted list summarizing the key points of the entire article.

AI Analysis Tab: Analyse Page: Performs a holistic AI analysis of the webpage, assessing its main topics, potential bias indicators, and key factual claims that might need verification.

Rewrite Content Tab: Full-Text Rewriter: Allows you to rewrite the entire article's text with specific options to control the Tone (more casual or formal) and Length (shorter, same, or more detailed).

Image Analysis Tab: View Analysis Results: Displays the results from any image analyses you have run using the context menu, creating a convenient history for the current page.

Calendar Events Tab: Smart Event Extraction: Uses an intelligent, multi-turn AI process to: Scan the article for any mention of dates or events. Filter out past dates and irrelevant mentions. Identify only actionable, future events. Generate a descriptive title and a contextual summary for each event. Remove any duplicate entries. Add to Calendar: Each extracted event has a button that opens a pre-filled Google Calendar event in a new tab, ready for you to save.

How we built it

With blood, sweat, tears, lots of bugs and lots of mean stack overflow comments. I used as many local built in apis as possible for our use case in order to keep it as local as possible.

Challenges I ran into

The prompt api was finicky and prompt engineering had to done extensively, especially for the critical thinking questions to be generated. Single shot did not work for the extraction of dates so a multi turn approach was required so that we could successfully get the dates of actionable events happening in the future as well as clean up duplicate entries for events mentioned multiple times in the web page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My friends and acquaintances who tested shared that it feels practical and functional. That is is a good partner in the background who can be called upon for further analysis through the UI when needed.

What I learned

  • How to make an extension and publish it
  • How to use context menus
  • The power that is coming to chrome and how to harness it
  • Advanced dev tools

What's next for News insight

  • Settings page for toggling automatically highlighting in the webpage
  • Settings page for customization of prompts for everything (analyse from context menu, critical thinking questions, how ai analysis is done)
  • Let users create a list of topics they want censored and automatically warn/hide them
  • Cross verify online whether the topic being viewed is covered by other news outlet and analyse differences between how the stories were told.
  • Add a chat tab so that the user can chat with the article
  • "Rate this website/sources" and share them online creating a leaderboard of most to least reliable online sources. It will be a pooled leaderboard using ratings from all people who use the extension.
  • Automate fact checking process -Add a history page
  • GET FUNDED AND GET UI/UX PEOPLE IN CUZ I CANNOT DO FRONT END DESIGN TO SAVE MY LIFE

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