Tipping Calculator

Inspiration

We're from Taiwan and we feel confused when getting a bill in a restaurant here. Because we don't know what percentage of tips should be exactly is (it seems be different in terms of the state) and what are those coins in our pockets.

What it does

It's a calculator app on Android. It has a normal calculator UI but can extract the number of the receipt from the camera. And it calculate the tipping number for you in terms of the location and habit of "don't want to have too much coins on hand" or "coins lover".

How we built it

We use certain OCR technology to extract the billing strings from a receipt and parse those string into numbers. Then organize the numbers and come out the subtotal number and calculate the tips for you in terms of the location where you are.

Challenges we ran into

Using rx-android as base framework is the most difficult part, we care about the good architecture. The 2nd challenge is to use an Android camera and extract information on-the-fly. We tried to extract billing information by requesting Vision APIs and it's just too slow. We'll try to use Google TensorFlow to do OCR on the client side so that UX would be better.