Butu 🧸: a friendly browser companion that gets lonely when you leave your work

Description and use

Butu is a Chrome/Firefox extension that uses a local embedding model to detect distraction and offers a teddy‑bear companion to help users refocus on their task.

Problem

Students and workers often get distracted by unrelated web pages while working on assignments, leading to lost focus and time.

Outcome

Butu provides a lightweight, offline‑capable focus companion that detects distraction via a local embedding model and uses hand‑drawn visuals and voice to gently nudge users back to their task, improving focus without requiring external APIs.

Workflow

• 1. User opens the extension and enters the task description and desired focus duration.
• 2. The extension loads a 17.5 MB embedding model (Xenova/paraphrase-MiniLM-L3-v2) via Transformers.js.
• 3. The model compares the task with the current page’s title, description, and visible text to determine relevance.
• 4. If the page is deemed irrelevant, the teddy bear appears and gradually draws crayon doodles, plays a music box, and speaks reminders.
• 5. The longer the user stays away, the more the bear’s drawings become unsettling and the voice becomes more urgent.
• 6. When the user returns to the task page, the bear disappears, the music stops, and a chime confirms focus is restored.
• 7. The session is logged locally in a handwritten scrapbook showing task, duration, and places visited.

Evidence

A small embedding model runs inside the browser to work out whether the page you're reading belongs to that task.

Source

It compares your task with the page title, description and a short excerpt of visible text.

Source

The quantized weights are about 17.5 MB. They’re downloaded once from Hugging Face and cached.

Source

Run ./build.sh, then load dist/chrome/ through Chrome’s Load unpacked, or dist/firefox/manifest.json through Firefox’s Load Temporary Add-on.

Source