SlothDesk: The Lazy Person’s Group Chat Summarizer

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady

What I Built

SlothDesk 🦥 is a lazy person's group-chat reader. Paste a long WhatsApp export, Slack thread or email chain, and it gives you:

• a two-line summary of what happened
• a short list of what actually needs you
• a note on what you can safely ignore
• a ready-to-send reply you can copy

Anyone who has come back to 200 unread messages to find one question aimed at them gets to be a little lazier.

Demo

🔗 Live: https://slothdesk-surf.onrender.com

Click Try a sample to see it work without pasting anything. The app is on Render's free tier, so the first load after a quiet spell can take about 30 seconds to wake up.

Code

https://github.com/sarasinha1207/SlothDesk

How I Built It

The stack is deliberately small: FastAPI on the backend, one plain HTML/CSS/JS page on the front, and no database, accounts or build step.

The AI is an open-weight Gemma model reached through an OpenAI-compatible chat API. A small cleanup step strips timestamps, "media omitted" lines and repeats, then keeps the most recent part of the chat. That keeps prompts short enough for small models. The model is asked for a JSON reply (summary, todo, ignore, reply), and a tolerant parser copes with models that wrap JSON in prose or code fences.

Because the model sits behind one endpoint URL, the same code runs two ways:

• Locally: Ollama running Gemma, fully offline.
• Deployed: a hosted Gemma endpoint, with the app on Render using a one-file render.yaml blueprint.

Swapping models is a change to one env var, LLM_MODEL.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Group chats are private. With an open-weight model and Ollama, the chat never leaves the laptop, which a closed API can't offer. The model is also swappable: if a smaller or newer one works better, I change one env var instead of rewriting code or switching vendors. The assistant's behavior lives in a single prompt file, so anyone can make it snarkier, terser or more formal. And running locally costs nothing per request.

Prize Categories

• Best Use of Render
• Best Use of Gemma