I built an AI chrome extension to 10x your reading in 2 days... here's how

Hey IH,

After posting this survey on Twitter where I asked "would you use a chrome extension that facilitates instant article summaries?" 85% of people said yes.

A few weeks ago I started copy and pasting news articles in chatgpt to summarize. I discovered it's good way to speed up my content consumption and retain way more information. Sometimes I would come across long articles that were daunting to read so i'd minimize the tab and decide to come back to it later. By the end of the week i'd have 15 tabs open and it would give me a slight bit of anxiety. This chatgpt trick was a way to breeze through them in a fraction of the time.

After running the survey to see if others would find benefit in an abstracted version of what I was already doing, I decided at that point to get to work. In the past I have had some ideas that were momentum driven, like in crypto, but they didn't really pan out because they took too long to develop and I missed my chance to capitalize on them.

In this situation I decided to take a page from @nico_jeannen book (on Twitter) and attempt to build this as a google chrome extension in 48 hours.

Getting started

I needed to first figure out the architecture of the app, how would it work and how to build it in a practical way.

I have experience in javascript so first went to the openai api documentation to find out how it works. The docs are pretty good so it was relatively straightforward getting the api working.

I then had to figure out how to build a chrome extension, I had never done this before. I decided to watch a couple tutorials on youtube from youtubers like TiffinTech to see what was entailed in building an extension.

First roadblock

The first roadblock I hit was that most of the online tutorials were utilizing the Manifest V2 which is being deprecated and new chrome extensions need to upgrade to V3. It took quite a bit of research as this upgrade is now being enforced by Chrome.

After about an hour of Googling I figured it out and got to the point where the extension was functional. I used the Chrome://Extensions portal to test the extension in a development environment.

I used MUI to do the UI so that it could be as straightforward as possible.

Second roadblock

Initially I was looking to do one-click summaries. Where you can go to a page and click summarize and then a summary would populate in the extension. I found that since sidebar ads, comments and other unassociated content are often all wrapped in <p></p> tags the chrome extension was unable to distinguish what was an article and what was another piece of unrelated content.

Therefore, the inaccuracy rate was very high ~50%. As a workaround I included a text box in the extension. A user goes to the news article, selects the article and pastes it into the text box, then clicks summarize. This improved the accuracy rate to 99%. I developed the extension so that the user does not need to delete the ads from the article if they're embedded in the body. This is because the AI is instructed to oversee small anomalies in the article. It knows to skip over a couple ads here and there.

Once I overcame this obstacle I began testing. Trying out all types of articles; CNN, FoxNews, Wall Street Journal, Vox, you name it.

Branding

Next I needed to create a brand. I decided to go with an Orange logo with reading glasses. I chose orange so that the color pops and you always see it in your chrome extension shortcuts. It stands out as a bright orange.

I chose reading glasses to personify the logo and make the logo the attractive character as described by Russell Brunson in "Dotcom Secrets" (if you haven't read it it's a classic marketing book).

I named the logo Max. The extension is called Reader Max. The website is ReaderMax.com.

Basically you use Max to read articles, he will summarize them for you. My girlfriend and I thought it was kind of cute/quirky.

Marketing

I built this project in public. I gave status updates on twitter over the 48 hours I was building.

This method was really cool because I had a bunch of people saying they were excited to try it. It did a great job of creating momentum for the first group of testers.

I also got some great feedback from excited users. Check out a cool piece of feedback here, here and here.

Looking for feedback

if you would like to try it check it out here, ReaderMax.com

Would love to get your feedback below or via DM!