Food Journal - log food with voice

Food Journal is Alexa Skill letting users to logging food in Fitbit

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Inspiration

Every 2-3 months I start logging the food I eat to take the control of my weight with the goal to lose it. After a couple of weeks, usually it becomes time-consuming and boring, and I gradually drop tracking food intake. The voice interface is much faster and more intuitive and I’m sure it will help me to say on track and live a healthier life. Food Journal Skill allows logging food 5x faster! Such breakthroughs really inspire me!

What it does

Food Journal Skill lets users log the food you eat and water you drink into your Fitbit account with Alexa Skill.

How I built it

I started with understanding how users will track their food and water consumption. I did several interviews with my friends and colleagues and realized that core feature of the skill is tracking, not summary or food information. After that I focused on conversation design — utterances, slots and possible edge cases. Kept in mind it should be as simple as possible and cover core functionality. Finally, having experience with python I chose Django as a framework and started development of the skill. First iteration was water tracking, as a result I got understanding how actually interaction model and intents work. In second iteration I was working on food tracking, faced with several things — matching Amazon. Food slot type with Fitbit library, articles a / an / the, ‘two’ and ‘to’ in utterances.

I setup ~100 test phrases, wrote a simple script to perform tests using ASK CLI, did test manually sitting with my Alexa device.

Result is >90% success rate of precise understanding and tracking food and water consumption.

Challenges I ran into

  1. Quality of dialogs to grasp both the food and the serving size
  2. API integration with Fitbit
  3. Voice interface quality testing

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  1. Solve the existing pain that millions of Fitbit users experience for 4 weeks
  2. More than 90% success rate to log food
  3. It’s 5x faster than logging food in Fitbit application

What I learned

  1. Amazon Alexa developer tools
  2. Foundations of voice interface design (intents, utterances, slots)

What's next for Food Journal

  1. Develop intents: get_summary, get_food_info
  2. Improve the quality of dialog to achieve 95%
  3. Build/improve multi-turn dialogs
  4. Start adding fresh content & funny elements into the voice experience
  5. Develop voice interface for other platforms

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