PC Finance Manager (aka the Budget Champ!)
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The PC Finance Manager is a smart budgeting and finance application for the desktop PC. Originally proposed as "Budget Champ!", the PC Finance Manager is a personal assistant to allow you to manage your personal finances by setting a monthly spending goal. Over the course of the month, you can track your spending habits by taking a photo of your receipts with a RealSense camera or from an ordinary camera phone. After you have uploaded your receipts, this is where the fun begins! The PC Finance Manager will analyze and annotate your data from your daily purchases, and will enable users to ask questions with their voice, such as: - "What is the cost diapers at Krogers"? - "Is milk cheaper at Walmart or at Cosco"? - “How much did I spend on gas in last month?” The PC Finance Manager leverages models provided by the OpenVINO™ toolkit for both text detection and text recognition of the line items in paper receipts to allow users to have fine-grained analysis of their daily purchases. The PC Finance Manager uses the Amazon Alexa Skills for the PC framework to allow users to speak in Natural Language for powerful voice queries of their personal finance data. ...learn more
Project status: Under Development
RealSense™, Artificial Intelligence, Graphics and Media, PC Skills
Groups
Early Innovation for PC Skills
Intel Technologies
Movidius NCS,
OpenVINO
Overview / Usage
The Problem:
Keeping a track of your spending is HARD! So why not use have a let your PC be your own personal accountant?
Online tools to manage your finances leave a big gap in analyzing your spending because they work primarily with your bank and credit card data. However, did you know that in 2018 according to CNBC (1), cash is the most widely used form of payment in the US, beating out credit cards, checks, and all other forms of payment?
For most people, housing and transportation costs (mortgage, apartment lease, car payments, etc.) are fixed/contractual expenses that don't change month-to-month. Therefore, there's no point to spending time and effort tracking those types of expenditures. So, if you REALLY want to save money every month, you need to keep track of your day-to-day purchases.
So why not set for yourself a spending limit every month? That's why the PC Finance Manager (formerly, Budget Champ!) was created.
References: (1) "The cashless society myth: PayPal, Square, and bitcoin have not stopped cash from being a growth business" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/06/spike-the-dollars-obit-cash-is-still-a-growth-business.html
Methodology / Approach
The Solution:
The PC Finance Manager is a tool that allows anyone with a PC to set a monthly spending goal, and then subsequently track their daily purchases to see their progress in achieving that goal. The PC Finance Manager is like Mint.com, but uses speech and NLP to give users deeper analysis of their data. Users of the PC Finance Manager can feel secure because the application is offline, and the users (themselves) are anonymous. Unlike online fintech applications, no bank data, credit card data, SSN, or tax id data is required to use the PC Finance Manager. The development of the solution will be split into multiple phases:
Technologies Used
The PC Finance Manager is a desktop PC application that uses:
- Amazon Alexa Skills for the PC to allow the user to query for purchase history with their voice
- Intel OpenVINO™ toolkit to allow the user to import paper receipts into the application for analysis
- Intel Movidius NCS devices to allow the user to have an accelerated experience for text detection with OpenVINO pre-trained models
- Intel RealSense camera is used to take the photo the receipt
- Intel Core i7 CPUs to allow the user to have speak voice commands in Natural Language
- Intel NLP Architect to analyze the Natural Language statements to perform intent extraction and named-entity recognition (NER)