SONTO

A calm Chrome sidebar that surfaces a slow drip of art, quotes, science, and news, so you get interesting things to pause on, without social media noise.

Screenshots

Quick start

Clone and build the extension:

git clone https://github.com/artttj/sonto.git
cd sonto
npm install
npm run build

Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, then select the dist/ folder.

The Zen feed works without an API key. For chat and embeddings, add your key in Settings > AI.

Provider	Get a key
OpenAI	https://platform.openai.com/api-keys
Gemini	https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey

Features

• Zen feed: A slow, thoughtful feed that shows one thing at a time
• Rich sources: Museum art, Mars rover photos, Science news, Atlas Obscura stories, quotes, trivia, and more
• Wikimedia paintings: Random paintings pulled from deep Wikimedia Commons categories
• Album of a Day: A rare daily album card with cover art and titles from a curated 700-album list via MusicBrainz
• Two modes: Scrolling feed or Cosmos mode with procedural spirograph animations
• Themes: Dark and light themes with WCAG 2.1 AA contrast compliance
• Save anything: Highlight text anywhere and press Alt+Shift+C or right-click to save
• Chat with your history: Ask questions about saved snippets using RAG with OpenAI or Gemini
• Related pages: Semantic search surfaces related pages from your browsing history
• Backup & restore: Export and import all data as JSON
• Custom sources: Add your own RSS feeds or JSON API endpoints
• Weekly digest: Optional summary of your saved content
• BYOK: Bring your own API key and pay the provider directly

Zen feed sources

Source	Content
1000-Word Philosophy	Philosophy essays
Atlas Obscura	Curious places and stories
Album of a Day	A rare daily pick from 200 Pitchfork and 500 Rolling Stone albums
Cleveland Museum of Art	Artworks and facts
Getty Museum	Paintings and sculptures
Haiku	Japanese haiku poems
Hacker News	Top tech stories
Japanese Proverbs	With English translation
The Met Museum	Public domain paintings
Oblique Strategies	Creative prompts
Perseverance Rover	Mars surface photos
Reddit	Science, history, space, philosophy
Rijksmuseum	Dutch Golden Age paintings
Smithsonian Smart News	Science and smart news
Wikimedia Commons Paintings	Random paintings from curated Commons categories
Custom RSS	Your own feeds
Custom JSON API	Any endpoint returning items

Toggle sources in Settings > Feed > Sources.

Languages

• English
• German (Deutsch)

Privacy

All data stays in your browser.

API calls go directly to OpenAI or Google. No proxy, no analytics, no tracking.

Feed content comes from public third-party APIs. Sonto does not own or filter it.

• OpenAI Privacy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
• Google Gemini Terms: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms

Tech

• TypeScript
• Chrome Extension Manifest V3
• Side Panel API
• IndexedDB with cosine similarity search
• esbuild bundling

Zero runtime dependencies.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.