Book a Cook

some of these UIs has been updated~ make sure you check out the new version in the demo video or download the app!

Inspiration

Cooking recipes comes from everywhere (Cookbooks, TikTok, Magazines), hard to keep track of them. Cookbooks are kind of useless because they're bulky and it's hard to find what you want to cook and what ingredients you have to cook with.

What it does

Scanning cookbooks: Simply scan the bar code (ISBN) at the back of book to import a cookbook! Currently we have 1,400 cookbooks and over 1 million recipes.
Importing videos: Simply forward the TikTok video to the app by clicking share. We have an average transcribing time of 8 seconds!
Managing ingredients: Enter what's in your kitchen by simply taking pictures!
Sorting recipes: the sorting is based on what's in your kitchen!
Widgets: Shows pictures of cooked recipies directly on the user's homescreen, so as to encourage them to cook everytime they open up their phone.
Generating shopping lists: based on the recipe and what's in your kitchen!
Adding specific recipes (from magazines) by taking pictures of them.

How we built it

Revenue cat for subscription management.
SQLite for the database of all the cookbooks, recipes, reviews, ISBN codes, book titles, recipe names....
APIs from Groq for Llama 3.1 8B Instant
APIs from OpenAI for picture analyzation
APIs from Deepgram for audio to text
Google firebase to manage users and accounts
Swift for UI and iOS App

Challenges we ran into

Collecting all the cookbooks and their recipes! (All while avoiding copyright laws.)
Reducing the extraction speed of importing recipe videos from TikTok from 20 seconds to 8 seconds!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We currently have 1,400 different cookbooks and over 1 million recipes, and they avoided the copyright issue.

Plus, it is really easy for us to expand the database to contain over half a million cookbooks and 100 million recipes.

What we learned

Revenue Cat for subscription management! IT WORKS GREAT!
SQLite databases

What's next for Book a Cook

Implement importing videos from Instagram, YouTube....
Include OCR for Recipe extractions from social media platforms. (Currently there is only voice extraction, but works 98% of the time)
Find the right pricing for subscriptions, like Ben mentioned in the live.
Publishing on AppStore, we're super close!
Implement better UIs for the Ingredients in the "Kitchen".