Echo

Inspiration

We've all been there. You've typed out an important email or a sensitive reply, and you hesitate before hitting "send." You re-read it, trying to guess how it will be perceived. Is this too harsh? Is my point clear? In a world of remote work and digital communication, the gap between our intent and our impact has never been wider. Existing AI writing assistants help us write faster, but they don't help us write more wisely or empathetically. We were inspired to create a tool that acts not as a ghostwriter, but as a private coach—a digital conscience to help us communicate more effectively. We wanted to close that intent-impact gap, one message at a time, and soon realized this individual challenge was a massive, unaddressed problem for entire organizations.

What it does

Echo is a Chrome Extension that serves as a real-time communication intelligence platform. For individuals, it's a private coach that analyzes your text in any input field to help you become a clearer, more empathetic communicator. Building on this, we developed Echo for Teams, a powerful solution for businesses to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance in every customer-facing interaction on platforms like Zendesk, Intercom, or Salesforce. Its core features include: Brand Voice Alignment: Instead of generic tone analysis, teams configure their unique Brand Voice Playbook (e.g., "Confident, but not arrogant"). Echo's on-device AI then coaches every agent in real-time to ensure their writing is consistently on-brand. Playbook & Compliance Guardrails: Echo provides agents with instant access to pre-approved language for complex topics like refunds or security. It also acts as a safety net, flagging problematic language or potential compliance risks before a message is sent. The "Perspective Shift" Button: This powerful feature remains, allowing any employee to analyze their message from the recipient's point of view and get suggestions for more collaborative and positive framing. 100% On-Device Privacy: This is the cornerstone of Echo. All analysis of sensitive customer and employee conversations is performed locally using Chrome's built-in AI. No sensitive data ever leaves the user's machine, ensuring complete privacy and security. How we built it Echo is built as a lightweight, performant Chrome Extension (Manifest V3) with a privacy-first architecture. Technology Stack: Vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to ensure minimal impact on browser performance. Architecture: A content_script detects active text fields and sends text to a background.js service worker for analysis with Chrome's Built-in AI. For our team features, a central admin configuration is securely pushed and stored locally on each extension, ensuring consistent analysis without server lookups. Chrome Built-in AI Integration: Prompt API: The heart of Echo, engineered with sophisticated prompts for nuanced tone, brand voice alignment, and the "Perspective Shift" analysis. Rewriter API: Powers contextual suggestions, offering improvements that align with company best practices. Writer API: Generates entirely new, constructive phrasing that maintains the user's core intent while aligning with brand voice. Challenges we ran into Nuanced Prompt Engineering: Getting Gemini Nano to reliably analyze text against an abstract, configurable "Brand Voice" required extensive prompt iteration and a clever system for injecting those rules into the analysis context. Designing a Non-Intrusive UI: Providing valuable feedback without distracting a busy sales or support agent was our biggest UX challenge. We landed on a subtle, "ambient" indicator that only reveals information on demand. Performance Optimization: We implemented smart debouncing and caching to ensure that continuously analyzing text never impacted browser performance, even in text-heavy applications like a support ticketing system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Unlocking a Truly Private AI Use Case for Business: We are incredibly proud of creating a tool that provides coaching on sensitive customer and company conversations—a use case where cloud-based AI is a non-starter due to immense privacy and security risks. Designing a Privacy-First Hybrid AI Model: We successfully designed an architecture for our team analytics that provides powerful, high-level insights to managers without ever exposing a single word of a customer's or employee's conversation. Building for Empathy at Scale: We designed a tool that doesn't just improve an individual's productivity, but can systemically elevate the communication quality and empathy of an entire organization.

What we learned

On-Device AI Fosters Creativity: The constraints of a local model forced us to design a smarter, more efficient system, proving that the best AI solution is the one that solves the right problem with the right tool. Privacy is the Ultimate Feature (Especially for B2B): We realized that for any problem involving sensitive data, on-device processing isn't just a benefit—it's the core requirement that makes a business solution viable and trustworthy. The Future is Augmentation, Not Automation: The most impactful AI tools act as partners to enhance human ability. Echo doesn't replace a support agent; it empowers them to be a better communicator, which is a far more valuable outcome.

What's next for Echo

Our vision is focused on building out Echo for Teams into a full-fledged communication intelligence platform. The Manager's Dashboard: Our immediate goal is to launch the hybrid AI analytics dashboard. Using anonymized metadata from the on-device extension, it will give managers high-level insights into team communication patterns, allowing for targeted coaching and process improvements without ever violating privacy. Deeper Platform Integrations: We will build custom-tailored experiences for our business users in platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Intercom, providing even more contextual coaching. Multimodal Context for Sales & Support: We will implement the multimodal Prompt API to allow Echo to analyze an agent's text in relation to a product screenshot or customer-provided image, enabling faster and more accurate support.

Built With

• buildinai
• css
• html5
• javascript