Nat Taylor — Blog, AI, Product Management & Tinkering

Test Drive: Video Scraping

Published on Oct 13, 2024.

Today I’m test driving video scraping, as described by Simon Willison at https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/. I’ll just follow his process exactly to get the amounts of my recent electric payments from my email client. So the process is:

1. Record a video of me clicking through the email reciepts
2. Upload to https://aistudio.google.com/ with the prompt “Turn this into a JSON array where each item has a yyyy-mm-dd date and a floating point dollar amount for that date”
3. Run it

Well, it worked perfectly.

[
  {
    "date": "2023-09-24",
    "amount": 40.48
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-08-22",
    "amount": 154.31
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-07-24",
    "amount": 125.40
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-06-24",
    "amount": 100.68
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-05-25",
    "amount": 118.28
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-04-22",
    "amount": 98.79
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-03-22",
    "amount": 126.24
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-02-23",
    "amount": 115.74
  },
  {
    "date": "2023-01-26",
    "amount": 110.73
  }
]
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