Visor — Writing Sessions & Google Docs History

See who wrote what in any Google Doc: replay, paste detection, color by author. Plus the companion to Visor Classroom sessions.

See the full revision history of any Google Doc: who wrote what, when, what was pasted in, and what was deleted along the way. Visor is also the companion to Visor Classroom, where students write essays in writing sessions their teacher starts. GOOGLE DOCS HISTORY Open any Google Doc or Google Slides file you can edit, click Visor, and the document's entire edit history is reconstructed and replayed in your browser. No API key, no sign-in needed for this part. SEE WHO WROTE WHAT Attribution is per character. Every surviving character is traced back to the edit that inserted it, so each contributor's share is counted, not estimated. For every author: characters written, characters deleted, active writing time, and typing speed in words per minute. If two people worked on a document at once, you can see exactly which parts each of them wrote. AWARE MODE — COLOR THE DOCUMENT BY AUTHOR Turn on AWARE and the text inside the Google Doc itself takes each author's color, on your screen only. Nothing in the document changes and nobody else sees it. A panel beside the page lists everyone in their color: hide or show anyone with a click, highlight text pasted from outside the document in yellow, and text pasted from within it in light blue. Percentages leave out pasted text by default, so they show who wrote the document rather than who brought text into it. Each kind of paste has its own switch. REPLAY THE DOCUMENT BEING WRITTEN Watch the document type itself out, character by character, at the pace it was actually written. Scrub to any moment, speed it up, or jump straight to a marker at each paste. It is the closest thing there is to looking over someone's shoulder while they wrote. PASTE DETECTION — INTERNAL VERSUS EXTERNAL Visor separates text pasted in from outside the document from text copied or moved around inside it. This distinction matters: moving a paragraph is ordinary editing, not plagiarism, and Visor never counts it against anyone. Only text that was not already in the document is reported as having come from elsewhere. What counts as a paste is measured per document rather than fixed, because Google batches fast typing into larger operations — so a quick typist is not misread as pasting. RECOVER DELETED TEXT Text that was written and then removed is still in the edit stream, even though it appears in no export or download of the document. Visor lists it, with who deleted it and when. WRITING SESSIONS AND TIMESTAMPS Every edit is timestamped, and Visor groups them into writing sessions — continuous stretches of work, listing everyone who wrote during each. Open a session on its own to see when it started, how long it took, exactly what text was added, and a replay of just that passage. Was it written over three weeks or in one panic at 2am? The activity view answers that: days worked on, busiest day, most common hour, longest single sitting, longest gap between writing days, plus activity charted by hour, day, week, month or year. DOCUMENT TABS If the file uses Google Docs tabs, every figure — contributors, pastes, replay, statistics — can be narrowed to a single tab. WHO IT IS FOR Teachers and instructors checking how a submission came together. Editors and managers seeing who contributed what to a shared draft. Writers curious about their own process. Anyone who has ever opened Google Docs version history, found it useless for answering "who actually wrote this", and wanted the real record. THERE IS NO SCORE Visor reports one counted quantity: the share of characters that arrived from outside the document. Deletion rate, typing cadence and block sizes are shown beside it as measurements and feed into nothing. There is no rating model and no weighting, because a number built from hand-picked weights tells you about the weights, not the document. Treat what you see as evidence to discuss, never as a verdict on a person. FOR VISOR CLASSROOM WRITING SESSIONS Connect the extension to your Visor account once. Then, only while a writing session is running (the Visor icon shows a red REC): • Your essay sits in Chrome's side panel next to the pages you're researching. • Cite this page (or Alt+Shift+C) reads the page's author, title and date and adds an MLA, APA or Chicago citation to your essay and its Works Cited. • If the assignment records research, the research you do for the essay is recorded for your teacher: your searches, the pages you visit and how long, and text you copy, so a paste can show where it came from. • In a locked, in-class session, sites your teacher didn't allow (and AI sites) show a "not allowed" page instead. Outside a session, none of that runs. Group projects: if your teacher linked your group's Google Doc, opening it sends its figures and its editors' names and email addresses, never its text, to your group's project. NO API, NO SIGN-IN FOR DOCS HISTORY The Docs history uses no Google API, no OAuth flow and no API key. It reads the document you already have open, using the session you are already signed in to, and computes everything locally. PRIVACY Docs history: the analysis happens in the tab and is discarded when you close it; nothing leaves the browser unless you choose Send to Visor (or your group's linked Doc sends its figures, never its text, to your project). Writing sessions: research is sent only to the Visor Classroom account you connected, only during a session, and only for assignments that record research. No keystrokes on other sites, no passwords, no page contents beyond what a student copies or cites, no telemetry, no analytics. Visor never labels writing as AI-generated. Full policy: https://visor-ed.web.app/privacy EDITORS ONLY Visor shows revision history only to people with edit access — the same rule Google Docs applies to its own version history. With view-only access the panel shows a locked state and performs no analysis. Light, dark and system themes included. Works on Google Docs and Google Slides.