Clever Currency Exchange

Ever travel to another country? Even the best of us have a tough time adjusting for a bit. All you need is this app! Set the country you are in and thats it. Point at any price tag and the app will convert it on screen for you. This is done through optical character recognition API provided by Google. Additionally, if you wish to manually type in the numbers, the app will convert it as you type it in. This allows the user to simply enter their numbers and eliminates the need submission. Overall, it is as “hands free” as an app could be. Just open the app and point. That’s it.

Here is an example of the phone camera being pointed at several price tags and processing all of them precisely. There is no button to take a picture. However, the ability to take photos might be useful for record keeping purposes.

This demonstrates the ability for manual input

This project is not being further developed at the moment. There is some cost to making this project go live. For one, there needs to be a way to obtain up to date exchange rates. One solution would be to query Yahoo! Finance, but that costs money. Another possible solution might be to run a web scraper that looks up exchange rates. Furthermore, there would be some additional cost to hosting certain resources. I believe this is still a decent idea that could make some money through banner ads.

Link to the repository, along with additional notes.