Wissil Watch

LOGO

Inspiration

As language evolves, it may be harder for people who do not utilize the internet as frequently as others to keep up with certain terminologies and phrases that may not seem obvious at first glance. To combat this, we made a chrome extension to allow people to have an easily accessible tool that identifies and explains dog whistles on webpages as a user surfs through the internet. We hope to allow people to stay informed on racial topics and changes in language in the hopes of creating a more mindful and less-prejudiced world.

What it does

A chrome extension that highlights key words and phrases obtained from parsing through a user's current webpage and processing its contents through artificial intelligence to identify and explain dog whistles. These highlighted dog whistles are highlighted in different colors based on severity and hovering over or clicking on these highlighted words pops up a tooltip that contains an explanation as to why it was marked as a dog whistle.

How we built it

As a group of 4, we evenly split up roles between front-end and back-end design. The front-end were responsible with designing a modern and minimalistic user interface alongside programming the functionality behind the highlights, pop-ups, toggles, and tooltips of our chrome extension to create a seamless and lightweight user experience. On the other hand, the back-end were further split up between handling the artificial intelligence api and the parsing of the webpage. This consisted of parsing a webpage to allow our artificial intelligence api to process the information, then receiving the information back to assist in handling which words and sentences to highlight and what information goes into the tooltips.

Challenges we ran into

Alongside the learning curve of learning to develop a project alongside others using a collaborative GitHub, We faced an issue where our parsed information overloaded the tokens of our api. Multiples fixes were placed to combat this issue: we fixed an issue with duplicate parsing of messages by creating a handler for it, made sure only relevant information like article titles, sections, headers were included while simultaneously removing filler information, and applying a buffer to artificial intelligence generation to minimize costs. Additionally, at the tail-end of our development stage, we faced an issue of one of our member's being locked out of his room due to his door lock breaking. Although we were unable to have our other member be able to participate with us as we were finalizing our code, we learned that in some instances, some problems need to be faced with perseverance alone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of creating a project that has a real world purpose that is both unique and creative. Additionally, we were proud of the scope our project was able to encompass: We originally thought to only have our chrome extension work on reddit, but our project proved to work on other sites like twitter and facebook. This helps us further achieve our goal by allowing the flow of information to reach users in many more areas of the internet. Finally, we were most proud of the adaptability and diligence of our group members. We learned to work as a team for the first time while simultaneously having to learn many new techniques and principles along the way to make a working final product.

What we learned

We learned many things about professional programming like the utilization of git and GitHub along with manipulating artificial intelligence api. Additionally, we learned more about time management which includes the planning of a feasible scope of a project while being mindful of roadblocks we could potentially face. We also learned the separation of roles is vital to a smooth development process as a specific focus allows for higher levels of specialization and less chance of stepping over each other. The separation of roles also always for us to assist each other when we combine the functionalities of the front-end and back-end.

What's next for Wissil Watch

An immediate project we would like to work on Wissl Watch is to allow users to submit whistles of their own and hold these whistles in a database to allow for more accurate and nuanced descriptions for the api to pull from along with facilitating an interactive and user-focused experience.