PickyEat VicHack 2024 submission

Inspiration

Deciding where to eat can be a surprisingly time-consuming task. Our inspiration for creating PickyEat came from our personal experiences and the realization that many people face this same daily challenge. Research shows that, on average, people spend between 72 to 120 hours per year just deciding where to eat. Moreover, 68% of Australians report that a lack of time and supplies at home prompts them to order out more frequently.

What it does

PickyEat helps you choose where to eat by using AI to present two restaurant options to pick from. The app adapts in real-time to your choices, learning your food preferences with each decision. When you choose the same option five times in a row, PickyEat locks in that restaurant as your final choice and provides additional details like its location, rating, and dietary options.

For those looking to explore new cuisines, we offer a "Try Something New" feature. This option disregards your previous preferences and introduces you to different cuisines, encouraging you to expand your food pallete by trying a new restaurant.

Challenges we ran into

As this was our first hackathon, both of us primarily specialize in data science, which made app development a significant challenge due to our limited experience in this area. Despite this, through extensive research, we were able to create a functional and up-to-standard website for our app. However, there are still areas where improvements could be made, and additional features we would have liked to include if we had more time and stronger app development skills.

·Another challenge was fine-tuning the Flavour Profile algorithm. It was crucial to accurately represent users' cuisine preferences and suggest restaurants that align with their tastes while still occasionally recommending something different to keep their options open to a wide variety of choices.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about the fundamentals of app development such as the importance of the design of the user interface. We also had our first experience in connecting to and utilising real-time database within our app.

Built With

• dart
• python