Progress
The primary focus for this week is the proposal presentation. Although I am not the presenter this time, research on the technical challenges and corresponding solution approaches is still my major effort. For the audio input section of our design, signal processing libraries including PyAudio, PyPi noisereduce module, and SpeechRecognition should be utilized to reduce noise and transfer audio to text strings. Natural language processing models such as spaCy and pre-trained BERT model are then considered to recognize user commands and categorize the purchased items. I designed a general block diagram from user input to all expected components and the various forms of output financial reports.
After the proposal presentation, I started to design the layout front-end UI of our web application. A primary draft is attached.
I also researched the usability of the spaCy library to identify and match the user commands to specific functionalities. The Tokenizer and Matcher in the library should be utilized, and I wrote several Python scripts to further familiarize myself with spaCy.
Schedule
I am on schedule.
Next Step
I will first focus on finalizing the design of front-end UI the next week, and our team will design the MVC framework of the web application together. I will also continue working on researching and implementing the NLP models.