small simple things = big wins

26d (edited) • 🏆 Wins

While not currently ICM-related, it is AI-related so I wanted to share a story.

My 90-plus-year-old grandmothers eyesight has declined and has trouble doing her shopping for herself and has asked for assistance but we didn't know what kind of things she typically was shopping for. She typically went to Walmart to get her necessities.

Most of us would have reached for the receipts and started making notes and talking about the items on those receipts but no that's not how I operate.

While she gathered up this year's receipts from Walmart, which she never throws away, I hung one of her wall hangings that had come off the wall a few weeks ago with some new command strips. Upon finishing that task I had about fifty or so crumpled up receipts in my hand.

Now keep in mind it's not very often where I can actually do something amazing in front of my family with technology even though I've been in the technology field for 30+ years. This task, two years ago, would have taken someone a couple of hours to manage and with significant human error.

Here's what we did.

I opened up Claude and said I'm going to scan in some receipts here. I want you to organize them into a table, line item by line item, finding duplicates and just giving them a count. (Scan .. I know I am old that is what we have done and the term doesn't leave me for 'take a picture' yet )

So I did about five receipts to begin with just to see how it did it and shockingly we had a 10 row, 4 column table right out the gate, with a few items already DE-duplicated with counts so we're off to the races.

I repeated the process, scanning about 6-8 receipts per comment with Claude, and Claude ingested them perfectly with a few exceptions. Let me explain.

As we were going through I noticed it was removing a couple columns to where I was now just to a two-column table instead of a four- or five-column table. What I realized was it was not able to maintain the price column because prices of some of the items were changing and it didn't have instructions on how to handle it. I said, "Recalculate all of the pricing and give it into a column next to each item and use average pricing for each item that you have duplicates of." That's all I said and I did it.

Now I'm not typing a thing on my keyboard. This has all been voice through Wispr Flow and Claude. On my mobile tablet .

The other column I noticed it was removing from our receipts was the UPC code column. I don't actually know why it did that but I presume it maybe just thought it was useless information. It turned out to be useless at the end of the day but I did have it added back.

On the last run of the receipts I said, "I noticed you removed the second column of my receipt, which I believe is the UPC code. Go back and look at all the images and pull the UPC codes into the tables to align with the items that we have on the table."

And it did it.

And the final step of the exercise for this was I wanted to be able to have a clickable URL in the table to go right to the item at Walmart. This one wasn't perfect but it was pretty dang close. Claude created a standard Walmart search URL and then appended the name that we had off the receipt to the search URL and for the most part they worked. This was after some gyrations with trying to make the UPC code searchable. Turns out Wal-Mart doesn't have a direct UPC search URL or the UPC codes we have weren't the right ones but in the commentary it felt determined that Wal-Mart doesn't search by UPCs on their website anyway.

So long story short after about 45 minutes our goal was nearly accomplished of having a full digital list of all the items that she regularly purchased from Walmart for the last seven months in a digital sharable table. We knew how often she purchased it. We could ask Claude when that item was last purchased and we had a link to go look at the item so we knew exactly what she was talking about when she said she wanted X Item ___.

I then had Claude create me an Excel file from the table that I could open in Google Sheets. I saved to Google Sheets and shared it with my mother so that she can help coordinate the item purchases when my grandmother needed certain items. And now all my grandmother has to do is call one of us and we can make sure we get the exact item she wants from her list.

Mind you I've been in the technology space for over 30+ years and have been waiting for TECH to finally be this good and useful in this kind of situation.

Look mom, no Laptop, no complicated app, no bulky scanner, just me and my camera phone and a digital dude named Claude that gets my $hit done my way. If you can talk, you can help someone solve a problem. Keep it real simple.

What would you have done differently?

Knowing all this concept, what would you do next?

Let me know in the comments.

1 comment

small simple things = big wins