A person wants to use AI to digitize receipts for expense tracking.

To digitize physical documents like receipts, the necessary technology isOptical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is a specialized AI field that involves the conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text. When you take a photo of a receipt, the AI analyzes the pixels to identify the shapes of letters and numbers, then translates those shapes into digital characters that can be stored in a database or an Excel spreadsheet.

In the context of expense tracking, advanced OCR does more than just "read" the text; it uses "intelligent character recognition" to understand the layout. It can identify which number is the "Total," which is the "Tax," and which is the "Date" by looking at their positions on the page and the keywords nearby. This makes OCR an essential bridge between the physical and digital worlds. While a "Virtual personal assistant" (Option B) mightusean OCR tool to help you, the specific technology doing the work of digitization is OCR. It saves hours of manual data entry and reduces the human error associated with typing in long strings of financial data, making it a powerful "practical application" of AI in business and personal finance.