Cash Reader: Bill Identifier

There is no documentation about the vibration patterns. Having vibrations is nice, but one does need to know what pattern represents a $1 bill or a $5 or a %10 bill. Thanks.

I do not understand the algorithm. How is it that $20 gives you four vibrations? What if I have a $2 bill? What about a $50 bill? How many vibrations would that generate?

Can I assume one vibration for $1, two for $5, three for $10, four for $20, and five for $50?

Cordially,

Curtis Chong

What about the U. S. 2 Dollar Bill? I have several of them, just wondering. Dave

The automatically generated prompt that you are giving up your refund rights if you keep using this purchase after 14 days is part of any and all in-app purchases. It's built directly into Apple's in-app purchasing API, I've seen this in every app that offers in-app purchases I've tried so far, so it's clearly built into the system by Apple itself. If the app was not accessible, 14 days is more than enough to find out and ask for a refund in time in that case. This is also automated right from iOS, no need for direct input from the developer of the app in question. When new currencies get added, the core features of the app remain the same, so there is no reason to expect a new currency to have any effect on the app's overall accessibility whatsoever. I personally favor the current approach of adding the currencies as DLC as they become available instead of building them right into the app with app updates. I need just one currency right now, my local one, so no need for the app to download everything or include everything from scratch and grow larger in size, however neglectable that increment would be. If I need euros or US dollars or anything else, I can easily download them at the time of need.

Hello everyone,
I am the author of Cash Reader and I will be following up this discussion to answer any question you might have.
Thank you all for using the Cash Reader and I hope that it will be a useful tool in your everyday life.
Tomas

Dear Admin,
please ad Indonesian rupiah,
thx

Hello Tomas,
Warm greetings to you and your family.
Thank you for developing such an awesome app.
This is a must have app. I wish to thank you again for your responsiveness.
The app is worth every penny.

Thanking you again,
With regards,
Moses,
Nairobi, Kenya.

tomas, i sent you an email and never got a response. please check when able:)

Hello there, please add Indian RS.

when you will update indian RS? i want to use your app.

Hi. Are there any plans to add more African currencies? Especially southern and central Africa?

Hi, i haven't tried this app, but will defenetly download it. About currencies... just a suggestion, but you should add currencies like pesos quetzales, and others from north and south america, if possibleW

Hello everyone,
thank you for your patience I took few days off around Christmas and now I am going to answer your questions and will work on new updates for Cash Reader.

Indonesian rupiah is already in processing and will be available during January, also with app translation to your language.

Thank you Moses for all your help with support for Kenya currency and translation to Swahili. We will do our best to have a new release for Kenya soon!

Regarding Indian Rupee. We are currently trying to purchase these banknotes in order to make them available in Cash Reader. However it is quite difficult because we have to collect all banknotes in circulation. I already try to buy them on eBay, but nobody offers newly issued Rupees (10, 50, 100, 200, 500, 2000) and I currently don't have any friend travelling to India to collect them for me.
If anybody from India wants to help us please write me email to tomas@cashreader.app We can send you money to bank account in advance to cover all costs with purchase and shipping.

Regarding identification at low light conditions. By default the Cash Reader uses automatic mode to switch on camera light in low light. You can also change this behaviour in app Settings.

On App Store the title can be maximum of 30 characters, this is the reason for the name "Cash Reader Tool for Blind". I would rather use "Cash Reader for visually impaired" but it's simply too long. Maybe we should have a contest for the best title with max 30 characters? :-)

Regarding other currencies. We are from Europe, Czech Republic so we could easily collect all European currencies but it is a bit difficult to reach to Latin America or African countries. However with your help all is possible. So don't hesitate to write us as almost half of currencies in Cash Reader is coming from cooperation with people like you and we value those most!

Many thanks
Tomas

Hello developers! I really like this app. Many thanks for your great work! I am writting to you cause I am willing to contribute to the Romanian localization for a small monthly payment of 5 or 10 USD, we can negotiate in private. I don't check my e-mail address so often, so you can add me on Skype at live:florianionascu or on Facebook at Florian Ionașcu. Thanks!

Hi Alex,
if you search just for Cash Reader it will be also shown in results. Having more words in title means that if someone does not know the name of our app and will just search the word blind, we will also appear in results.

Regarding coins. Our identification engine would be able to do it. However we would need to collect all coin designs and this would be a difficult task to do. We are a small team therefore it's not doable right now but we would like to work on coins in future.

greetings tomas, This is Joseph Weakland, Since my response to your last email never got received, i'll enclude my suggestion here. It would be nice if your app could tell the difference between the front of a bill versus the back. Fore example, if you had a $1 and had the front side towards the camera it could say $1 front

Hello Alex,
I appreciate your feedback and ideas.
As I am talking to visually impaired from Czech (my country) they would also like to have coins identification for foreign currencies as it helps on travels.
Right now the effort connected with adding coins would be too much on us.
We would have no problem to pay for the coins and shipping but it would mean a lot of time taken by arrangements with people collecting coins. Afterwards we would need to make several thousands of photos for every coin as we do for banknotes to add them to out identification engine. I am sure that we will get to this point one day but right now we want to focus our limited resources to banknotes identification.
Thanks for your understanding.
Tomas

Hello everyone, I would post here the release notes when new update of Cash Reader is on App Store.
If this information would be annoying for you just let me know. You can always find the release notes on the App Store and in the Cash Reader on first launch after installing the new update.
Release notes for version 1.20:
New settings to switch Cash Reader into black and white color palette for maximum contrast.
Denomination number displayed on screen now respects the language settings of phone e.g. uses arabic letters for arabic language.
Cash Reader is now localized also into these new languages:
Italian, Croatian, Bosnian.
Cash Reader is now able to identify the banknotes of these new currencies:
Israeli shekel, Qatari riyal, Omani rial, Iranian rial, Pakistani rupee.

There is a subscription model, so I guess some revenue would come from there, but why have a subscription model if you have the choise to buy the full version outright anyway?

I think one password also has this option, but buying the full version for one password is a lot more expensive, so it's easier to simply subscribe.

This app, at least here in australia is still quite affordable.

Following, I wish you add also the Philippine peso in the future update. I installed this app in my iPhone 7 but can't use it yet because no Philippine peso yet. Hoping for the best.

Thanks

I am comparing this app to NantMobile Money Reader, the app I’ve been using for currency detection for the past couple of years or so. This app will probably end up replacing Money Reader, since the latter hasn’t been kept up to date and is not recognizing newer bills in some areas (not yet an issue in the US to my knowledge, but I’m sure the day will come when it becomes an issue).

I should note that my only iOS device right now is an iPad Mini, which does not have a flashlight. This means that the app is probably more sensitive to lighting conditions than it would be if I had a flashlight available.

In my bedroom, which does not have much lighting, Cash Reader didn’t work at all, but the older Money Reader had absolutely no trouble identifying any of the bills in my wallet. I have always been amazed at how well Money Reader operated in low light, even without a flashlight. I have no idea how they managed to pull it off, but it sure was a nice feature of the app.

I went into the bathroom, which has much better lighting, and in that room the two apps performed about equally, although one or two of the bills took a little longer for Cash Reader to identify (they were older bills and are likely faded). Even with the short delay, the identification was more than quick enough for me, and I am happy with the overall results.

I don’t know if it is possible for you to improve low light performance, but if you can that would be appreciated.

The US government also has an app for detecting US currency, called EyeNote, which I used to use before I switched to Money Reader. EyeNote was, in my experience, much slower at detecting currency, and it was more picky about how far away from the device the bill was positioned. That said, one thing the app did do was announce whether it was detecting the front or back of a note. As I recall, the documentation indicated that the reason for this was to help in orienting the bill when inserting it into a vending machine or similar, because apparently some machines require the front of the bill to be face up. I wouldn’t know, because I have never used such a machine myself, but if that is indeed the case, then I suppose having this knowledge could be beneficial. The OCD in me would also like to have all bills facing the same way in my wallet, simply for the sake of neatness, but for me there is no practical value in knowing which is the front and which is the back.

Hello Tomas,
Thanks for engaging the community in developing this app.

I've noticed that the vibrations occur slightly behind the speech announcement of the bill. Would it be possible to have it vibrate at the same time as it reads the bill?

I find that this app does do a good job of identifying bills quickly but I feel like it's still not as fast as Money Reader. I have several friends who have used Money Reader as a cashier because they can identify bills just as quickly as sighted people. It would be wonderful if the speed of Cash Reader is just as quick. also, knowing the front and back of bills would be helpful when using vending machines since some machines can be picky.

I'm currently using the 14-day trial of this app, and like what I've seen so far. It's identified all the Canadian bills I've scanned perfectly. For comparison, I also tried using the same bills with Money Reader and Seeing AI. With Money Reader, it seemed to take a long time before it would tell me the denomination of the bill I was scanning (or maybe I didn't have the camera pointed at it correctly). Seeing AI worked as well, but also tends to crash every so often on my iPhone 6 Plus device when on the Currency screen. I think Cash Reader will be my go-to app for money identification at this point. Keep up the great work.

Dear everyone at AppleVis,
I am back from vacation. Thank you for all your questions and I will try to answer them below. I am adding also some answers for question I missed before and it will be a long post so I will try to be brief at answers :)

#24: Alex, yes in order to add new currency I have to collect one banknote for every design actively used in the country, which is sometimes difficult, than add meta information to the app and make a new release.

#25: More African currencies are coming. Many thanks to Moses who helps with Kenyan currency and maybe he will be able to collect neighbouring countries. Some currencies are tricky to get so your help here is invaluable.

#35: We need several thousand of photos for every banknote to support any distance from camera, any angle, any light conditions such as sunny, rainy, inside buildings, dark, night, flash usage, etc. This is why the Cash Reader is different from other apps and works so fast and reliably, we really put this effort into it :)
You are right that apps can easily die out because they choose wrong model to be financially viable. Cash Reader started with lifetime license which were expensive and auto renewable subscriptions on monthly and yearly basis which were cheap but gave us the stable income. After 5 months in production we did not pass the Apple review during some minor update, because Apple said that our app does not offer content dynamic enough to justify subscriptions. I argued for weeks with Apple but at the end had to remove subscriptions. Currently the app has Lifetime license with discounted price and on February I try it again with cheaper non-renewable yearly subscription which might pass the review. We will see, but for future viability I would like to support both lifetime license and subscription based model.
Regarding the Money Reader, we don't have any connection to them.

#38: Philippine peso is scheduled to be released on February.

#39: Regarding low light conditions. It's actually my fault because I did not realise that there are apple devices capable of iOS11 or newer without flashlight so I did not consider this option. I will take a look on that. In new release there will be option to use also front camera, so in case you would let the screen enabled it would work, but I am not sure if your iPad has front camera.
I have a large debt for US dollars which makes it's identification less precise then other currencies. It was one of the first currencies in Cash Reader and our procedure of making photos in that time was not as good as what we do now. There will definitely come an update during February which will help it. Also I am aware of new bills designs coming soon to US and they will be implemented.

#41: Synchronization between the start of vibrations and start of speech is a nice idea I will think of that.
Regarding the identification of front and back side of the note. Currently it would mean a huge effort to do it so I don't plan this feature in near future, thanks for understanding.

#42: Many thanks I am happy to hear that Canadian bills are working fine. I think that there will be some new bill designs coming soon so they will be definitely implemented and provided in update. Please consider giving us review on App Store, this would help us rank better on Canadian market, much appreciated!

Hello everyone,
we just released a new update and I hope you will like it. Please find the release notes below.

You can switch between rear and front camera in Settings.
Camera now continuously changes focus for more reliable identification.
Cash Reader is now able to identify the banknotes of these new currencies:
Saudi riyal (serie 4 and 5)
Cash Reader is now localized also into these new languages:
Hebrew, Spanish, Serbian, Swahili, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Simplified).

Hi
I love this app! Great job!

Best
Malthe

Cash reader is the most effective money identifier app out there. When it comes to efficiency, it is the clear winner. I had to push a whole folder away and fix it on my HomeScreen.
Purchasing this app was money well spent.

I love the app too. One question though. Sometimes, I put a dollar bill up to it and it says 50 then it says the correct dollar value. I know I don't have any $50 bills. lol