#5 / 5 rate

Omni

632 users

2021-06-30

create.omniscience

create.omniscience@gma...

This extension is being deprecated because it doesn't follow Chrome extension best practices.

Extension Information

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Description

Chrome sidebar with real time information retrieval.

Chrome sidebar that brings up the most relevant information as you read or write in your browser.

Omni allows you to conduct real-time search queries proactively over any text of your choice, whether it be websites, books or private documents. This search is at the level of sentences which can be brought up as you type or in response to your highlighting. Information will appear at the right hand side of your page once you've opened the extension.

Quick Instructions
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While browsing, open the extension by clicking the Omni logo or using the keyboard shortcut Alt+F (Option+F on Mac). Now you can trigger retrievals by
- Highlighting any text on the page.
- Typing into any textbox on the page.
- Typing into the textbox at the top of the sidebar.

Results will be displayed in the sidebar on the right of the screen. You can click on a result to see it in the original context, then click again to hide it.

You can choose which dataset to get search results from by selecting it from the drop-down menu. You can even upload your own private dataset (we support most common document formats) by clicking the “Datasets” button in the top right hand corner of the sidebar, logging in, and following the instructions.

Tips:
- Currently retrieval quality is highest for queries of around 1-3 sentences. For shorter queries, add more context to increase the quality of results.
- Pin Consilience to make it easy to open and close it quickly.
- Highlighting and typing will not work for pages that use advanced canvas-based text rendering, most prominently Google Docs. We’re working on it!

Why Omni?
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Omni brings information retrieval into the mechanics of creation. Typical search workflows have the creator break out of their work to a new website, search for a document, skim or read the document for relevant information, and then go back to their task to use that information to direct some decision. The real-time workflow will bring the snippet of decision-relevant information directly to the interface where creation is occurring.

Semantic similarity in real time means that when you author your great work, the concordant ideas written by literary & intellectual titans deepens your ideation. Attaching your own personal notes, you'll see the way that your thought on a subject has evolved over time, bringing your related ideas to mind where you had once forgotten them.

Reviews

hoxha hoxha

The best knowledge management tool out there. Please enable the possibility of appending text to database by rightclick. And after that the possibility of including citations first,.

Gabriel Garrett

This is a very powerful research tool for compiling thoughts in real-time.

Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu

I've tried several different online writing assistants and this is a unique and pretty cool tool that's a good complement to something like Grammarly. In fact, I recommend to use both Grammarly and Consilience as they do different things and work well together. Once you've installed both extensions, here's how you use them. Go to an online text editor website such as editpad.org and create a new text pad. Start writing and Grammarly will check your spelling, but what about when you don't know what to write next? This is where Consilience is useful. To activate Consilience, press alt-F on windows or option-F on mac. A side panel will appear at the right side of the window. Click the drop-down menu at the top of the side panel. In that drop-down menu, click "Enable Multiselect". Then, click the checkboxes to enable some data sources that are relevant to the topic you are writing about; for example, if you are writing about entrepreneurship, you could enable paulgraham.com and seekingalpha.com. Then close the drop-down. (note: You can enable as many data sources as you like, but the performance will slow down if you enable more.) Now, click in the search bar below the drop-down. Start typing a search phrase, for example you could type in "how to assess the fundamental value of a stock". Search results will appear, like they would if you had a search engine attached to your text editor. But so far this is expected; this isn't the cool part. The really cool part is this: You can select (highlight) a sentence you've written in the text editor pad, and the sentence that you select is automatically searched by Consilience! In other words, you can search for anything you've written simply by selecting it! This makes it really easy to look up what other authors have written about the same topic, and you can quickly see if what you wrote is different than the consensus of other authors (making your writing either contrarian or possibly incorrect), or you can get ideas for new sentences that you might want to add, near the sentence you selected. Basically, it's easy to get inspiration by using Consilience as a built-in research tool integrated directly with selecting anything you write. The current state of the extension has some limitations that I hope they improve, such as not enough built in data sources, and slow performance if you have too many data sources active. But as long as they keep improving it, I'm going to be using it for my writing endeavors as it provides value in a way that other writing assistants don't do.