MegaBite

MegaBite and Alexa
Meal picker (on a laptop)
Dashboard (on a tablet)
Recipe details (on a tablet)
Login screen (on a phone)
Splash screen

Inspiration

There are two scenarios in the life of a coder. The first: you make a trip to the stores, buy everything your eye lands on, and end up throwing out half of it by the end of the week. The second: you take a break from your laptop at 10 PM, you're starving, but you find nothing in the fridge. We thought it was time to put an end to this.

What it does

MegaBite is an intelligent food planner. You can choose what you'll eat in the following week from a list of delicious recipes. Our app will work its magic to tell you how much of each ingredient to buy. Then, when 10 PM comes rolling around, you can ask your Amazon Echo to speak out the recipe.

How we built it

Starting from a Material Design CSS template, we designed a responsive web application with a PHP backend. Behind the scenes, we keep track of user accounts and store food plans in an SQL database. We process this information on the fly with PHP to calculate recipes and shopping lists.

We also integrate with Amazon's Alexa Skills API, which required two parts. On Amazon's developer console, we defined the interaction model and recognised phrases for the skill. Secondly, our server listens for HTTP requests from Alexa, processes the information, and returns a JSON-formatted response.

Challenges we ran into

Having only begun working on the project during the Hackathon, it was a challenge to handle the tricky and poorly documented Alexa APIs, in a short amount of time. It was also incredibly difficult to debug the PHP behind Alexa, as Amazon's error message gave us no insight into the problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very pleased with the fact that our app "Just Works". With a fully functional user account system, and a flawless integration with Alexa, MegaBite is more than a minimum viable product.

What we learned

Working with voice interaction was an interesting experience. We learned how to deal with the ambiguities of the English language when defining the Echo's interaction model. On the other end of the line, we also had to write our responses in ways that Alexa could successfully speak out loud.

What's next for MegaBite

The road ahead for MegaBite is full of possibilities. Food is an enormous part of our daily life, and having an intelligent platform can be of great help. We have many ideas lined up for the future: