Shopping Buddy

Changing shelf prices make it hard to estimate a cart’s total while shopping. I built Shopping Buddy, an iPhone app that lets shoppers record items as they add them and see a running estimate of spending before checkout. The idea was motivated by a period of rapidly rising prices, when the cost of frequently purchased items could change quickly enough that it was difficult to estimate the total value of a cart while shopping.

The shopper photographs an item or its price information. A vision-language model uses text recognition and visual context to extract the item’s name and price. The app adds each scan to a shopping list and updates the cart total, turning a series of photos into an itemized view of the trip.

The demo below shows Shopping Buddy in use during an in-store shopping trip.