Coffee World

A digital voice assistant to find the perfect coffee. All in the comfort of your own home

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Inspiration

2020 has changed many things in this world, we spend more time at home, we can’t travel to exotic countries as we did before, we can’t enjoy simple coffee breaks with our coworkers, we can’t meet our friends for a coffee and even going shopping has changed. Wearing a mask we spend as little time as possible in a supermarket. So what does that mean for our coffee consumption? We still drink coffee of course, it is one of the small joys we have left but something is missing. There is always our favorite brand that we drink all day but what if we want to try something new? Our friends can’t tell us about their experiences, neither do coworkers, we cant sit in a coffee shop and order a cup of something new, we are not traveling, can’t taste coffee in different countries and in the supermarket we don't want to spend too much time in the coffee aisle to read about different coffees. So who can help us find new tastes that we will like? This is where this digital voice assistant is stepping in. In our kitchen we can talk about coffee, discuss the best preparation, the newest beans on the market, how they taste and once we have found something we like, we can order it directly via voice, all while we are in the kitchen, drink our coffee and dream about a trip to Guatemala, Costa Rica or Indonesia.

What it does

We are using Amazon's Voice Assistant Alexa to improve our coffee experience at home. Since the people spend a lot more time at home, every company needs to find a way to stay in contact with their customers and digital helpers like Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa are a great way to stay in touch when stores and coffee shops are closed and even shopping in the supermarket is no fun anymore. Our solution will bring the expertise of Tchibo directly to the customer. Our Alexa Skill can search for different types of Coffee. Based on the origin country if you want to explore something exotic or just based on the taste. strong or mild, heavy roasting, sweet... Our digital Coffee World has the right coffees for you. And for those who don't know what they want, we can also give you suggestions based on the coffee you previously chose. But that is not all. Tchibo is not just about coffee, so we integrated other products from the store too. When you find something you like, you can directly order it via voice and get it delivered to your home the next day. No need to start your computer, open a website and search for it. Just say a few words and the Tchibo Coffee will be shipped to your home. Right now we can easily use the Amazon store since Alexa supports it out of the box but we could also integrate the Tchibo store if we get access to the real Tchibo API and link the accounts. Since it is now possible to integrate Alexa directly into a coffee machine(or any other device), we also added a showcase of how it would look if we don't have to get up and press a button on the machine and wait till the coffee is done. We can start the process from our couch and we only get up when the coffee is ready. (Sadly we don't have the technology yet to bring the coffee to the couch or home office) The machine will also let us know when we are running low on beans and we can directly order resupplies.

How we built it

We set up a serverless PostgreSQL Database, wrote our code in Node.js and created a lambda function that is hosted in the cloud too and a REST api to let the lambda function communicate with the database. We used AWS as a cloud provider and designed the entire skill in a way that you can use it all over the world without any performance loss, it doesn't matter where you use it or how many people use it and you can easily add more functionality or other voice assistants and connect an analytics website to the REST api. We can also change our database without having to change one line of code in our Alexa Skill.

Challenges we ran into

The hackathon api did not provide any english translations which is essential when the hackathon and presentation are in English. Especially if your project is a voice assistant ;-) We got to know about this hackathon just 2 weeks before the deadline so everything was super hectic at the end and with a little more time we could have added more of our ideas to the prototype. While I am writing this, there is less than 5 hours to submit and we still have to shoot the video.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a project, that fits all 3 categories of this hackathon. We created a new consumer touchpoint (buy via voice), we have addon services(recipes and details of coffees) and in 5 years we will hopefully have coffee machines that will be operated via voice commands and can tell us more about our coffee. The time was super short but at the end we have a running prototype with data and pictures from the english Tchibo stores.

What we learned

We learned a lot about all the different products that Tchibo has to offer and that it is very different from country to country. Websites and descriptions/details of products vary a lot and we realised that Tchibo is not just Coffee. In our search for sample data we visited the US Store, UK Store and German Store. In hindsight we should have probably gone with a simpler architecture which would have been a lot quicker to build. Database, REST and Skill in 2 Weeks was too much.

What's next for Coffee World

We want to connect to the real api and offer voice assistance for all products. Get more information about the products into this project. We also want to see a coffee machine with Alexa integration and a small display come to life and would love to be part of it. Let's make buying coffee as easy as possible.

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