Inspiration
Often times when cooking we run into the problem of getting our laptops or phones dirty pulling up the recipe to check the directions. This can be incredibly harmful to our devices but often a required risk if we want to ensure our food comes out properly.
What it does
Allows the user to upload a recipe from allrecipes.com and have Alexa read the ingredients and directions with ease!
How we built it
Using Amazon Developer for Alexa running node.js on a heroku server with a ruby on rails web interface.
Challenges we ran into
Having incredibly limited Ruby experience, and no experience in Rails greatly limited efficiency of production. There was computer error too which prevented the further development of the program which would take in user input.
Figuring out how to program custom functions onto Alexa was a challenge as Amazon does not have much documentation outside of their AWS lambda functions. Wanting to use something we were more familiar with, like node.js, made our project a bit harder to get started but easier in the long run.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Getting Alexa to talk with us! Also figuring out node.js and heroku despite having minimal prior experience with the two.
What we learned
Ruby/Rails, Node.js, heroku, Alexa Development
What's next for Cooking With Alexa
Implementing the Ruby functionality in order to receive user input. Finishing up the commands to make them less buggy (Not being able to understand non-seeded ingredient names, Problems with Echo's security settings at 8 secodns, etc.)
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.