External Brain

Overview

External Brain is a platform that helps you track and reference where important information can be found across your digital environment. It aggregates data from various sources, stores it in a vectorized format, and provides users with references to the original sources, so you can quickly locate and revisit the information in its original context.

Instead of presenting the data directly, External Brain gives you a list of relevant references — whether it’s a webpage, a Slack message, a JIRA ticket, or an email — so you can go back and review the exact source.

Key Components:

• Browser Extension: Tracks your activity across the web and stores references to pages you’ve spent time on, so you can quickly find the URL of that great article or resource you read a week ago.
• JIRA Integration: Stores references to JIRA issues from your workspace, helping you quickly find relevant tickets by providing links to the JIRA board. You can customize the JQL to filter which JIRAs are included.
• Slack Integration: Captures references to Slack conversations in selected channels, allowing you to search and retrieve messages by providing links back to the original conversation.
• Email Integration: Periodically stores analyzes your email communication, so when you search, it directs you to the original email thread in your inbox.
• Folder Monitoring: Monitors selected folders on your device, storing references to documents so you can easily track down files by finding the location on your system.

How It Works

External Brain doesn’t return the actual content from these sources. Instead, it helps you locate where the data exists by providing a reference to the original source. For example, if you’re trying to recall a curry recipe you read last week, External Brain will tell you exactly which webpage (URL) it was on, so you can go back and read it in full.

Technical details

• A browser extension based on HTML, JS, CSS
• A JIRA integration based on Node.JS
• A PHP based IMAP integration that downloads emails
• A PHP push-based Slack integration
• A Python based script, called via crontab that analyses selected folder's files
• A React-based front-end to search for content
• A Python FastAPI backend:
  Accepts requests from extensions and integrations for storing the vectorized documents in Pinecone.io
  WebSocket interface for the frontend using Pinecone for retrieving vectors to the frontend as reference.
  OpenAI prompts for extracting information from images.
• A logo generated by DALL·E 3 so probably a bot holds the copyrights :)