I built a doctor booking app that uses Firebase machine learning to read insurance card text 💫

So for the doctor search/booking app, I needed to add a way for the user to input a picture of their insurance card and it automatically set their insurance carrier and plan.⠀
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I found that Google’s Firebase has a great machine learning based service with text recognizing! ⚙️⠀
I decided to implement it so that I could recognize the text on a user’s insurance card and then figure out their insurance carrier/plan.⠀
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Never setup a Firebase backend before but it was pretty intuitive! ⠀
Firebase offers two options for recognizing text in photos:⠀
1. Free version that runs on the device; the needed files increase the size of the app⠀
2. Paid version (after first 1000 requests) that uses a remote service they host to process the images/text.⠀
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Here’s what I to change to implement it:⠀
— Install the Firebase library/SDK for React Native⠀
— Add a camera/photo button to the search screen⠀
— Open the image picker on button click; user can take/choose a picture of their insurance card⠀
— Send the image through the Firebase text recognizer service⠀
— Send the recognized text to the API (new endpoints I built) to find matching carriers/plans from the database⠀
— Set the insurance carrier and plan text boxes with the results⠀
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I felt good to learn and use a little Firebase as well as a machine learning based service.⠀
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⁉️ Let me know what ya’ll think!

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