Read Better | Devpost

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Inspiration

ADHD is a prevalent disability in the world, with more than 3.5% of the world's population suffering from the disorder. One of our team members is part of this 3.5%, dealing with the effects of an ADHD-ridden education and lifestyle. One of his biggest problems in learning is focused reading, where he finds himself unable to focus on one text for a long period of time. We designed Read Better to help him - along the millions of others across the world - have the same level of focused education that the rest of us are so lucky to have.

What it does

Read Better is a google extension that identifies the most important details of any highlighted text. It operates as a javascript-based app with a very simple UI to fit for any visual needs (common symptom of ADHD). It uses a language-based machine learning model to analyze the highlighted text to identify what details are most useful and important to understand, helping to retain the main ideas and details.

How we built it

We built this using the "manifest" google extension framework. We designed a simple and effective UI with Node.js, React.js, HTML, and a lot of CSS to control how the user wants their text formatted as well as activating the program. We wrote the backend of our program in javascript, utilizing OpenAI's DaVinci 3.0 Model to analyze our text. We also wrote the functionality of each checkbox in JS, along with a live preview of the formatting.

Challenges we ran into

It took a very long time to sync our formatting to the text on the screen. Formatting the text itself, and converting from the text present on the screen to HTML that we could easily manipulate was an unusual process. We often found that the latency of the DaVinci model was an issue for user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a program that could help the people around us with a problem they faced everyday was very motivating to finish on. We were able to make a very clean UI and almost fully achieve what we set out to do, and make a usable tool for all.

What we learned

A simple project can be used to help a lot of people. Editing on-screen HTML was a very time consuming but educational project.

What's next for Read Better

We plan to make a rotating-API-key script so we do not run out of usable API-keys for our users. We also plan on publishing this tool publicly to make this technology accessible to anybody that uses Google.