CraveBuddy

Helping people with their weight-management. Fighting obesity. Achieving health.

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Inspiration

For the past years, I was obese and one year ago I decided to change. One evening I was very hungry while looking on Devpost (currently still cutting weight). I was overwhelmed by my lack of organization for the meal-planning of that certain week. So I came up with the idea to build an app which would fix the organization problem, then extended it to make it more useful by making a retrospective about my journey and identifying the pain points that I had.

What it does

Helping users with their nutrition by providing a healthier approach to tasty recipes. Main features:

  1. AI Healthier meal generation - improves the macro of the food in order to make weight loss easier, highlights the differences between classic recipes and the healthier recipes. It leverages the power of PromptAPI to make smart swaps in the original recipe to achieve a weight-friendly recipe.
  2. Leftovers meal generation - a sustainable approach for cooking, allowing the user to generate a recipe by inputing the leftovers they have
  3. Weekly plan generation - it generates a weekly plan containing 4 meals a day, balanced out in such a way so the user is in 10% caloric deficit.
  4. Meals and Weekly plan exporting - the recipes and weekly plans can be saved and then exported as a .md file. This means they can be imported in almost any notes app. I demonstrated this with Notion and Apple notes in the demo.
  5. Providing nutritional need information based in scientific formulas and generating a personalized advice with the help of PromptAPI.
  6. Allows weight tracking, providing a history in user's profile page, making it easier to track progress.
  7. Meal preparation on the spot! CraveBuddy provides a modal interface that is supposed to help users while they are preparing their healthy recipes. This interface leverages the recipes that PromptAPI generated and provides a step-by-step preparation interactive guide. Also, it has a hands-free version. Turning on auto-advance & read-out-loud options will allow the user to cook without touching their device, as CraveBuddy will automatically advance to the next step when the step timer is done and it will read out loud the instructions.

How we built it

Then, I built a branding around that idea, built the UX/UI design in Figma: I aimed for something friendly, fresh, nutrition-oriented which inspires healthy decisions. Research on how the built-in AI APIs work, bare implementation of the language model. Started building the web application, adding features, polishing features, refining ideas, removing redundant features, adding better UX/UI. Updated the landing page. Demo recording + editing & submission

Challenges we ran into

Balancing output predictability and performance while prompting the language model. I needed a structured JSON response for the meals generation and for the weekly plan generation from PromptAPI but I noticed that when I used the response schema constraint attribute the performance was significantly decreased, so instead I went with a plain string prompt, without passing the schema for the PromptAPI response. This way, even though the approach is more risky (small chance of unpredictable output from the language model), the meal generation time went down from 45-50 seconds to 25-35 seconds.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I know for most people being obese is not a choice. I'm proud of the fact that I can build something based on my personal experience and make this journey easier for other persons.

Speaking technically, I'm proud of that simple exporting feature and not restricting users to use their recipes and weekly plans strictly in Crave-buddy.

On more thing: the fact that we can import recipes in other notes app and still have the pictures of our tasty recipes. I made the image generation service store the images in a bucket just for that reason.

What we learned

In software, the word "done" never means "done", there is always something to improve, especially when you approach a deadline :)

What's next for Crave buddy

Improving perfomance, adding new features such as importing recipes, exporting all recipes and all weekly plans at once, sharing options to share recipes with your friends.

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