The past months have been filled with news about ChatGPT, Bard, etc. Thankfully, there are some heroic attempts to bring that power to the users.
I wanted to contribute to that effort with my side project, an extension for Chrome: it makes searching the history by meaning – instead of the exact words – possible.
This is only a proof of concept, building on the excellent transformers.js[0], and running entirely in the browser. My goal here is to explore the possibilities unlocked by a client-side AI.
I would love to have your feedback, to know which direction that project should follow!
Manifest v3 is a remarkably hostile development environment: Google knows that people block advertisements with extensions and want to limit their scope. I had to adapt a lot of code, and as such, making it work cross-browser would require more than a few changes. But I understand your point and want Pinbot to run on more browsers, especially Firefox!
However, the Chrome web store review might take some time to allow the update.
I noticed it doesn't remember tweets directly, just twitter.com as url if you check the feed. It's hard to find again a tweet at that location.
Thank you for reporting the bug regarding Twitter. I will investigate.
One question I have is about the persistence of this extension when Im not using it and influence on other browsing loads like if I visit a WebGPU heavy shader site will having Pinbot installed drop my available framerate for example ?
Otherwise its a great Idea and will definitely put it on at least one machine I use so thanks for putting this out into the world and good luck with it !
Regarding performance, here is how it works: the extension accumulates page changes (thanks to a Mutation Observer[1], so I do not have to regularly read and compare the page) for some time, then checks if the sentences are in the database. Only unknown sentences are converted to embeddings.
The extension is CPU-only currently (WebGPU support was not merged yet in transformers.js), so it may be slow. I understand your concern, while that is a proof of concept, I consider a good performance to be vital to a good user experience.
[0] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sqlite-wasm-in-the-browser... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs...
Chrome is obviously incentivized to push you to making a Google search anytime you're trying to find something, instead of looking within your browser.
You are fetching the browsing data, push it back to your server to be fed to AI, then receive queries.. right?
Prevent it from indexing sites I say, such as my banking website, etc. I think that should be a top priority. And having a strong privacy policy on the site (I know you say it's local, etc), but this is pretty great and I am already enjoying it.
Regarding the privacy policy, you have a point: I did not put one on the website, as everything works offline, but people may indeed look for one.
> The current extension keeps your history for only two weeks. Accounts keep all your history and synchronize it across your devices, while maintaining your privacy. Upcoming in a future version!
