RuralConnect: Bridging digital divide between rural communities

Abstract: This describes the development of an application designed to assist low-literacy rural communities to handle their bill and paper safely and efficiently. To make its functionality work, the application features a very robust login mechanism that avails itself of the fingerprint authentication mode for confirmed access. After the customers authenticate themselves, they can use the camera of their device to scan critical documents like utility bills, PAN cards, and Aadhar cards. The application uses NLP techniques, particularly that of SpaCy, to analyze the retrieved text and provide critical insights derived after using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to pull the text from these scanned images. This enables non-English-speaking users to access the application through transliteration options in Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil together with the text to be read. The application will transform the words into speech by using Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS), depending on the needs of the user as it is unlikely that the audio would be in any other language The app has a reminder alert about payments which are soon to be overdue with respect to bills, so one may not suffer from late fines and scams. This makes the application easy to use, accessible, and full of an inclusive approach in order to improve the management of documents and bills for the vulnerable communities of the rural fraternity.

Keywords: Rural development, fraud, extract text, insights, OCR, NLP, multi lingual support, text-to-speech, multi-language translation, document access, , camera, gTTS, notification reminder.