Overview
By the end of this guide, you will be able to capture screenshots of current mortgage rates and analyze them using vision capabilities. You’ll learn how to:- Capture real-time mortgage data using Browserbase’s headless browser automation.
- Analyze visual data with IBM watsonx.ai’s available vision language models to extract meaningful information.
- Accessing otherwise inaccessible data. Data can often be embedded within iframes, making it difficult to scrape with traditional methods
- Automating financial data collection from websites without structured APIs.
- Converting visual mortgage rate data into structured information.
- Building financial monitoring tools that track rate changes over time.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you have:- IBM Watson Project ID & API key
- Access to IBM’s foundation models including vision capabilities
- Browserbase Project ID & API key
- Python environment with required dependencies
Why Screenshots?
Traditional web scraping methods often fail when dealing with:- Content embedded within iframes (like the Freddie Mac mortgage rates)
- Data rendered by JavaScript after page load
- Complex interactive visualizations
- Protected or anti-scraping content