msvana / notiondipity-extension

Browser extension for discovering hidden knowledge in your Notion knowledge base

Notiondipity

Notiondipity is a browser extension for exploiting connections between Notion pages. It provides the following features:

• Recommending pages similar to the currently open Notion page
• Semantic search based on the semantic similarity between the query and Notion pages
• Generating project ideas from the current page and up to 2 most similar pages

You can download the extension from Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-Ons.

To find similar pages, Notiondipity uses text-embedding-ada-002 embeddings from OpenAI. Cosine distance between page embeddings is used as a similarity metric. The gpt-3.5-turbo model is used to generate project ideas.

Backend

The extension has a backend hosted at https://notiondipity-backend.fly.dev/. It facilitates communication between the extension and the Notion API. Notion API does not support cross-site requests, so it can't be used directly from a browser. The backend is responsible for calculating all page embeddings and finding most similar pages. It uses a PostgreSQL database to store the following information:

• SHA256 hash of the unique Notion user ID
• embedding of each Notion page
• the title of each Notion page
• encrypted contents of each Notion page

We use https://fly.io/ to host the backend. There are no other third parties with access to this data.

Authentication

To use the extension and get page recommendations you need to authenticate with your Notion account. Your access token is stored only locally in your browser and is sent to the backend with each request. The backend itself does not store the access token.

Building the extension from source

To build the extension from source you need to have node.js and npm installed on your system. Then you have to install all dependencies, e.g.:

$ cd notiondipity-extension
$ npm install

You can then run one of the following build commands:

$ TARGET=firefox npm run build-prod
$ TARGET=chrome npm run build-prod
$ TARGET=firefox npm run build-dev
$ TARGET=chrome npm run build-dev

As you might have guessed, the TARGET environment variable determines the target browser. You can also choose to build for production or for development, the only difference currently being the backend URL. The development build sets http://localhost:5001/ as backend URL referring to a local development backend instance.

The extension build can be found in the dist/ directory and has takes the form of an unpacked extension. The build process was tested on Fedora 37, Fedora 38 and macOS Ventura.