Briefer

An Android application based on TensorFlow's BERT to perform NLP operations on runtime contents.

Google released BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in 2018 aiming for high performance lightweight Natural Language Processing for processors having limited resources such as those of smartphones. In 2022, Google launched a demo application on GitHub for showcasing BERT's usage on Android smartphones. However, the app was made in Kotlin and had a limited functionality. Hence I decided to use the same BERT technology used in the app but make it more user friendly and improve the features to make the app actually usable.

Features

• Dynamically add/delete new topic of interest
• View past topics
• No need of internet connection
• Follows Google's latest Material You guidelines with dynamic color themeing

Screenshots

About App	Adding content	List of previous topics	Asking questions

Installation

For common users:

To directly install the apk on your phone, you can check current releases and download the apk file from release section.

Points to consider while installing:

• Make sure you are using Android Oreo (8.0) or above
• The APK file size is drastically large (around 175 MB) since the BERT language model is included inside the APK file which is around 100 MB.

For developers:

To open and run the Android Application, you will need to install Android Studio or any other supported IDE. Then clone this repository using

  git clone https://github.com/Akruzen/Briefer

This project makes use of both Java and Kotlin for its execution. Hence, if you intend to use this in your own project, make sure you install Kotlin dependency:

  implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:1.9.0'
  implementation 'org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib:1.9.0'

Also, you will need to add Tensorflow Lite libraries in your build.gradle file:

  implementation 'org.tensorflow:tensorflow-lite-task-text:0.4.4'
  implementation 'org.tensorflow:tensorflow-lite-gpu-delegate-plugin:0.4.4'
  implementation 'org.tensorflow:tensorflow-lite-gpu:2.13.0'

Feedback

If you have any feedback, you can reach me on Discord.