EchoAI — Counterpoint Reading Extension
A Chrome side-panel extension that analyzes any article and generates a neutral summary, an opposing viewpoint, a bias score, and alternative readings — built in 24 hours at QuackHacks 2025, where it took 1st place in the Data Science track.
Overview
EchoAI helps readers escape echo chambers. Viewing any article, it produces a neutral/factual summary, an opposing-viewpoint summary, a bias-spectrum score, and recommendations for alternative perspectives — all inside a clean Chrome side panel that stays consistent across sites. Built in 24 hours at the University of Oregon's Fall 2025 QuackHacks hackathon — 1st place, Data Science track.
How it works
A content script extracts the page text; a background worker scores it with a multi-vector
bias algorithm — the VADER lexicon quantifies emotional/ideological leaning while the GDELT
API grounds the article against global coverage — and sends it to Google Gemini for
summarization and counter-viewpoint generation. The side panel renders a bias bar, the
summaries, and alternative-article suggestions (fetched via <topic> opposing viewpoint
search queries).
To keep the AI affordable, EchoAI preprocesses locally — chunking, caching, and keyword filtering in an asynchronous pipeline that reuses the same NLP token cache before any tokens are spent.
Team
Built with Madeline Luu and Rayna Patel.