EnergyBot
ABOUT
EnergyBot was created by BCG Digital Ventures to de-monopolize and simplify the energy buying process by allowing the purchase to be made between the energy providers and the consumers without the middle man.
MY ROLE
I was the product manager and the designer for this project. I worked with three other developers to create the mobile app for EnergyBot to specifically help users onboard.
Process: IDentifying the Problem
With the research provided by BCG Digital Ventures, my team identified the main pain points of the current onboarding process. Because most energy bills are still mailed by paper, it required a lot of effort on the user to manually enter all necessary information.
So we created a mobile app that automatically parses energy bills, organizes them, and directly uploads that information to the user’s EnergyBot account. This feature makes the onboarding so much easier and faster!
BONUS: BEHIND THE TECHNOLOGY
The main challenge, however, was getting the technology to work! With Google Vision API, it was easy to get JSON data out of any image. The challenge, however, was that the data needed an algorithm to parse the information into displayable text. Because the energy bills did not all look the same, or provide the same data, we could rely on using location (X-axis and Y-axis) to track and define the necessary information.
As a result, we used energy bills’ naming conventions to parse the information. After comparing multiple energy bills, we knew that at least each bill would have the written text “Amount Due”, “Address”, and “Name”. We used these commonalities to created a Bill Parser class that would extract data based on keywords -- getCost(), getAddress(), getName(). Each function was programed uniquely; for example, getCost() looked for numbers following the text “Amount Due.”
RESULTS
We showed the final prototype to stakeholders and the app was well received. The project received more seed funding than originally promised for the commercialization phrase.