Inspiration
We found that there wasn't a browser for students out there that specifically catered to a student's wants and needs. The closest thing to a true educational browser is just Google Chrome with a bunch of janky extensions. We noticed that even in the AI era, modern browsers haven't really changed in around decade. We saw how bulky and bland the usual browser experience was so we wanted to have a more autonomous and simple experience for productive browsing.
What it does
Noteva works like a normal browser but with added AI features to be able to handle and automate different tabs, research modes for bulk sourcing of different subjects, and educative features to teach and quiz you on web pages you visit. This browser was designed to be used for educational purposes and to streamline the workflow of researchers and students by integrating powerful AI tools directly into the browsing experience.
How we built it
We built it mostly using Chromium and Electron for the browser shell, React and Tailwind for the frontend design, MongoDB for the personal cloud notes feature, and Gemini and ElevenLabs for the AI infrastructure. For building the app, me and my team utilized Antigravity to handle most of the coding tasks as an incredibly efficient unit.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into several challenges due to all of us being quite new to building entire browser but with enough determination (and Google Gemini), we were able to overcome pretty much all of them. A problem we ran into very early on is that Gemini on Antigravity didn't generate very good looking raw Electron UI. But after one of us suggested to migrate all the frontend code to React, it kind of became magically not ugly which really helped us sculpt out our design visions way easier. One problem we ran into repeatedly is since we all pushed into the main git branch throughout the hackathon, it was quite tricky to resolve all the merge conflicts. But through that struggle, we made the very cursed discovery that we can resolve any single merge conflicts by vibe coding the git commands. Another minor issue was dealing with some minor Electron related UI bugs since it handles frontend elements a bit differently compared to a normal web app but they were mostly resolvable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Just the fact we all made an entire browser is the accomplishment itself. I think the single biggest accomplishment is that every person on the team did their fair share in the browser project in terms of features and additions in building Noteva.
What we learned
We learned a lot about how to leverage Antigravity to split and finish tasks really quickly so through that system we created an incredibly powerful team of software engineers on this browser project. As we faced the adversity of implementation our ambitious ideas, we overall learned that perseverance was the key to truly execute on our ideals and vision for this project.
What's next for Notevi
We plan to have an account system that has different paid tiers for access to the cloud notes and more powerful AI browser agent models. We hope to partner with Timeslicer to limit screen time on certain social media sites in order to ensure our users are productive and gets things done.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.