Live Plan Eat - Alexa Skill

Live, Plan, Eat takes the stress out of meal planning. Ask Alexa for meal ideas and to save meals to your meal plan.

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Inspiration

As a working mother of three children, meal planning is always a stressful time for me. I wanted an easy way to search for meal ideas and to save a meal plan for each day of the week. This saves me time when planning meals and also saves me from having to answer the routine question for everyone in my household, "What's for dinner today"? My answer to that question is now, "Ask Alexa"!

What it does

The Alexa Live, Plan, Eat skill takes the stress out of meal planning. Don't know what to cook? Just ask Alexa for meal ideas. Want to plan your weekly menu in advance? Just ask Alexa to save a menu item to your meal plan for today, tomorrow, or a specific date. Live Plan Eat currently supports Italian, Caribbean, Southwest, Greek, Indian, and Southern dishes, in the Dessert, Meal, Side, Drink, and Snack categories. You can add a dish for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack time.

How I built it

I developed this skill using the inline editor in the AWS Lambda console to write and deploy my Python code. I used DynamoDB as the back-end to store the data for the application and accessed the DynamoDB tables using the AWS SDK library. I also created a static website that advertises the skill and shows users how to interact with the skill.

Challenges I ran into

My main challenge was thinking through all of the "utterances" and ways that users would interact with the skill. Everyone is different and tends to ask questions differently; thinking through all the different scenarios was a challenge. For example, to invoke the search intent, users may say, "Tell me about X", "I want to know about X", "What is X", or "Can you tell me about X". I had to make sure to account for the multitude of phrases.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am a Java developer, but wanted to challenge myself to learn a new skill. Since I had never programmed in Python before, I challenged myself to develop Live Plan Eat in Python. I am proud that I was able to develop this skill in Python. I now love programming without semicolons! :-)

What I learned

I learned so many things. I learned about Python, the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), adding/retrieving records from DynamoDB, and the overall development and testing process for a Skill. Now, that I know how easy it is to create skills that are backed with a database, I will definitely be creating more.

What's next for Live Plan Eat - Alexa Skill

There are two upcoming exciting enhancements:

1.)The users will be able to view their weekly meal plan on an interactive calendar on the Live Plan Eat website, http://www.liveplaneat.com. The website will be a Bootstrap/AngularJS application that calls out to an API created in the AWS API Gateway that retrieves data from the DynamoDB table to display to the user. This next step gives a user interface to the Alexa skill.

2.) The Skill will return ingredients and recipes for each menu item.

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