TikPin

A coworker of mine shared a frustration with me, and I built a product based off that. She mentioned she would watch a TikTok that mentions restaurant recommendations, then go to Google Maps and search each one. This is a slow and manual process. TikPin is a Chrome extension that does this for you: it reads the video, names the places, resolves each one to a real address, and puts them in the saved list you can open directly in Google Maps.

A TikTok hides its locations in three different places. Sometimes the name is on-screen text and never spoken aloud. Sometimes it's only said out loud. Sometimes it's just in the description. So, TikPin reads all three: sampled video frames, an optional audio transcript, and the description, and hands everything to a model.

The way it works is after the model has extracted a name, it still needs to find the place. For example, "Izakaya Osen" is a string, but a pin in Google Maps needs coordinates. So, every classified shop goes through Google Places Text Search, which is what turns it into an address, a star rating, hours, a phone number, a price level, and a link that opens in Maps.

After all of the classification, you get the output: a real Google Maps list, on the phone in your pocket. No import step, no typing.

Built as a Chrome extension in the usual three pieces — a content script on the TikTok page, a background service worker, and the popup UI — with an LLM doing extraction, Whisper (OpenAI's open-source speech-to-text model) handling the optional transcript, Google Places resolving names into real coordinates, and Leaflet drawing the map dashboard. If you'd like to try it or hear more about how it works, email me.