Watchdog

Keeps you on-topic while you study on YouTube. Everything runs on your device.

Watchdog keeps you on-topic while you study on YouTube. You open YouTube to watch a lecture on AWS certification. Forty minutes later you are three videos deep into something else entirely. Watchdog is a small guard against that drift. It reads the title of the video you are watching, compares it with the topic you set, and if the two do not match it pauses the video and shows a quiet reminder card before the recommendation rabbit hole gets you. HOW IT WORKS 1. Click the Watchdog icon and enter what you are studying, for example "AWS certification" or "Python data structures". 2. Watch YouTube as normal. 3. When a video is unrelated to your topic, it pauses and a card appears with a short quote to bring you back. 4. Choose what happens next: go back, continue anyway, snooze for 15 minutes, or allow that channel for good. Videos that match your topic are left completely alone. Watchdog never blocks you: if anything goes wrong, the video simply plays. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT - Understands meaning, not keywords. A small language model runs on your device and judges whether a title is related to your topic, so "EC2 networking explained" counts as studying AWS even though the word "AWS" never appears. - Three sensitivity levels. Relaxed, Balanced, and Strict, so you decide how firm the reminder should be. - Shorts are flagged on sight. Their titles carry no useful signal, so by default every Short triggers a reminder. You can turn this off. - Channel allow list. Mark a channel as always fine and Watchdog stops checking it. - Snooze. Fifteen minutes of quiet when you need a real break. - 100 curated quotes. Chosen for focus and follow-through, shown at random. PRIVACY Everything happens on your computer. Video titles are read on the page, scored locally, and discarded. They are never sent anywhere. Your focus topic and settings are stored in the browser and stay on your machine. Watchdog makes exactly one kind of network request: downloading the language model (23 MB) from Hugging Face the first time you use it. After that it is cached and works offline. No account. No analytics. No telemetry. No ads. The only permissions requested are storage, for your settings, and access to youtube.com, for reading video titles. GOOD TO KNOW - On first use the model downloads once; the popup shows progress. After that each check takes about a quarter of a second. - Works on every YouTube watch page, including Shorts. - Open source under the MIT licence: https://github.com/Zahoor-ishfaq/youtube-watchdog