I built Wait For It: tell an open Gemma what you're waiting for, it checks rarely, and it got 35 of 36 real pages right with 0 false alarms

This account tells the story of "Wait For It," an AI-powered web page that allows users to specify what they are waiting for and receive notifications when the specified event occurs. The project was built by the author during the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3, with the goal of demonstrating a slow and steady approach to solving everyday problems.

The author's inspiration for the project stemmed from their own habit of checking various web pages for relevant updates, often refreshing the same page multiple times per day. "Wait For It" aims to alleviate this repetitive checking by using an open-weight model, Gemma 4, to monitor specified pages or search results for any changes or occurrences.

Gemma 4 reads the webpage or Google search results and determines whether the event has happened or changed since the last notification. Depending on the situation, it provides the user with a browser notification or a voice note in either English or Urdu. The tool is designed to be lazier by only checking the specified page or results every few hours, and every week for events that are far away in the future.

The core functionality of the project involves a simple Node.js application that processes user inputs, retrieves updates from pages or search results, and communicates the outcomes to the user via notifications or voice messages. The entire system is built on a free Render instance, allowing for easy deployment and minimal resources required to run it.

The author emphasizes that the project's unique selling point is its ability to read the page or search results and verify the occurrence of an event, rather than simply relying on keyword alerts which could potentially miss important changes. To ensure accuracy, the system extracts a quote from the page and compares it to the user's input, confirming that the necessary words are present before notifying the user.

In summary, "Wait For It" is an open-source AI tool that helps users save time by only notifying them when their specified event occurs or changes, rather than constantly refreshing web pages for updates. By using an open-weight model like Gemma 4 and implementing a simple Node.js application, the project provides an efficient and accurate solution to the problem of waiting for important updates.