ContextCopilot

ContextCopilot: a browser-side copilot for “instant context”

Inspiration

While researching, studying, and building projects, we kept hitting the same friction point: information overload. Pages are dense, time is limited, and it’s easy to skim past important details and lose context. We wanted a tool that stays where the information lives and helps you understand, interrogate, and revisit content without breaking your workflow or copying text into another app. ContextCopilot was built to act as a lightweight copilot in your browser, one that helps you stay oriented in what you’re reading and extract meaning on demand.

What it does

ContextCopilot is a Chrome extension that provides instant, context-aware assistance for any webpage you’re viewing. It can:

Extract and understand the active page’s content
Generate a clear, structured overview of the page on demand
Answer natural-language questions using the page itself as the source of truth
Maintain a searchable history of your interactions (overviews and questions), so insights aren’t lost once you close the tab

Rather than replacing the page, ContextCopilot works alongside it, helping you clarify, explore, and retain information in real time.

How we built it

We built a Chrome Extension with:

A content script that safely extracts relevant text from the active webpage
A React + TypeScript popup UI designed for fast, focused interactions in a constrained space
A Node.js + Express API that handles context-aware analysis and responses
A MongoDB-backed data model for persisting user history, including page metadata, generated insights, and Q&A interactions

This architecture allows the extension to remain responsive while supporting more advanced processing and long-term storage.

Challenges we ran into

Extension architecture & messaging: getting reliable communication between the popup, background script, and content script.

UX constraints: designing a clean popup UI in a small space while keeping interactions fast and readable.

Keeping outputs useful: balancing short summaries with enough structure that users can actually act on them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-How to structure a full-stack feature from UI → API → database. -Practical debugging under time pressure: isolating build issues, validating assumptions, and shipping incremental improvements.

What we learned

History tab: searchable history (by site/title/date) with filters for “Summaries” vs “Q&A”. Export: copy/share notes as Markdown or save to Notion/Google Docs. Smarter context: highlight key terms on-page and cite which sections informed the answer. Privacy controls: toggles to disable saving, clear history, and restrict to selected text only.

What's next for ContextCopilot

Smarter context: highlight key terms on-page and cite which sections informed the answer. Privacy controls: toggles to disable saving, clear history, and restrict to selected text only.