Travel Receipt Tracker

Keep track of your travel plans with the help of Google Cloud OCR and AutoML

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Inspiration

Organization is not an easy task. We were exhausted having to dig through our many e-mail addresses to find the right trip details and wanted to create an easy way to keep track of your travel plans with ease.

What it does

Travel Receipt Tracker allows users to upload images and save important information such as arrival and departure times in one central page. You can access all of your uploaded trips in one page and easily browse and expand more details for each trip.

How we built it

We love React and chose to use the Next.js 13 framework for its ability to create API routes. These allowed us to quickly set up endpoints to process data for our application. We used Google Cloud OCR to generate text for which we run named entity recognition to identify information regarding your trips.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced involved the implementation of OCR and named entity recognition into our application. First, we had to create a dataset to train our ML model by manually parsing a large pool of travel receipts containing the dates, departure times, arrival times, and other information and format them according to this standard. We gathered and labeled each receipt with its corresponding departure and arrival times, departure and arrival dates, and other fields included in travel receipts. After creating our dataset, we used it to train our AutoML model which took over 3 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Created a user-friendly interface with smooth navigation and modal views
  • Leveraged artificial intelligence to enhance our application and create a more streamlined user experience
  • Made effective use of Next.js's API routes
  • Successfully formatted and created a dataset to train a model for named entity recognition

What we learned

Prior to creating this project, we had not worked with many cloud services and machine learning applications. We were able to learn a lot about numerous services and gained hands-on experience with Google Cloud.

What's next for Travel Receipt Tracker

  • Support for more file extensions: For this project, we focused on delivering features for image uploads because of its wide range of support and ease of access. Users can produce images with a quick screenshot of their receipts whether they are on mobile or desktop and directly upload it to our application. For further usability, we would support other file types including .docx, .pdf, .txt, and more.
  • Calendar integration: Integration or the ability to export to Google Calendar and other calendar applications would be useful in achieving our goal of helping users stay organized.

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