Food Tracker

With this skill, you can keep track of what's in your fridge and figure out what to eat!

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Inspiration

Do you ever wonder what you have in your fridge, freezer, or cabinets, but don't want to dig around? Do you ever wonder how long those leftovers have been in the fridge?

Track your food with this skill, and I will let you know from the comfort of your couch!

This is relevant to the subject at hand (environment) because here in the US, 40% of our food is thrown away (or composted). With a skill like this, you can easily find out what you should eat next. That way, you waste less food and therefore help the environment, because those resources that were used to make the food were not in vein! :)

What it does

Simply, you can add, get, remove, and list food as well as ask to suggest food or recipes. If you mark a food as a condiment, I will not suggest the food.

Here are some examples of what you can say:

  • Add {milk} to {fridge} {top shelf/bottom drawer/top drawer/second drawer/other}
  • Undo addition (will remove the most recent food addition)
  • Move {milk} to {fridge} {top shelf}
  • Do I have {milk}?
  • Suggest food
  • Suggest recipe/supper/breakfast/a meal
  • Remove/I ate/I drank {food} (can also say from fridge top shelf)
  • Add {milk} to {fridge} {top shelf} to use by {use by date}
  • Mark {mustard} as condiment
  • Mark {ketchup} from the {fridge} {top shelf} as condiment

If you say "Alexa, open food tracker", I will also remind you of what I can do. If you say, "Alexa, ask food tracker for help", I will list some examples of the things I can do.

How I built it

I started basing it from my medicine tracker app, changing it to be for food instead. I use one DynamoDB table to store the user's food information, and another DynamoDB table to store recipes I provide.

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to use an API to get recipes, but all of the ones I found I would have had to pay for.

Also, I submitted my skill to certify, but as I was creating the video found a bug. I had to withdraw my certification request with the reason akin to "I found an issue", fix the bug and re-request certification.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Since I couldn't call an API to get recipes, I had the idea to create a new recipe table with default recipes.

What I learned

I learned more about the importance code maintenance, perhaps even in hackathons, after running into a bug that I couldn't quickly determine why it was happening.

What's next for Food Tracker

I want users to be able to add their own favorite recipes. I want to be able to have food tracker suggest a shopping list, and be able to email it to the users. I want the user to be able to be shopping, and then go to a website I make to check if they have certain food items, and a way to add food by typing if they want to. I want to be able to alert the user near supper time what they can make for supper, if possible. I want to call an API for recipes, if users would subscribe so that I can then in turn pay for that API with their subscription. I'm also wondering how much data I should restrict, should this become popular, I think I might have to have a certain cap on the number of items or recipes you can have for free, without subscribing or giving a one time fee.

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