Ratatouille

Recipe Page (with links)
Home Page
Recommended Recipes
Recipe Page (with videos)
Search Page

Inspiration

Many elderly individuals suffer with memory challenges, making it difficult to follow complex recipes, remember ingredients, and often rely on caregivers. In fact, a study in 2021 by McGill University states that 75% of old age victims go undiagnosed for these disorders (such as dementia and Alzheimer's). This inspired us to create a user-friendly, accessible solution, Ratatouille.

What it does

Ratatouille is not just a cooking assistant; it's a companion that brings the kitchen to life. With a simple snap of a picture, Ratatouille can offer a description of information and sources for any meal, making cooking a fun and stress-free experience, and offers personalized recipe suggestions based on user preferences.

How we built it

We built Ratatouille using Python, Flask, and Jinja as the backend of the webapp, and vanilla HTML and Tailwind CSS on the front end to provide a user-friendly app, allowing everyone (including seniors) to seamlessly browse through the app with no hesitations! Additionally, in the backend, we used Google Gemini for analyzing images, which it provides a name for the dish, a brief description of it, and ingredients needed. The name of the dish is then sent to Beautiful Soup to web scrape recipes from AllRecipes.com, and sent to YouTube to find tutorials on how to make the dish.

Challenges we ran into

With a lack of experience in hackathons, we underestimated the time needed to complete features that we would have liked to add (such as a personal assistant), integrating APIs (due to limits), and searching for recipes in a consistent manner.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the accuracy of our image recognition feature, which allows users to quickly identify recipes from photos, as it provides users the ability to search and find recipes with ease in a user-friendly and welcoming way!

What we learned

We learned how to integrate Flask with Google Gemini into a webapp that analyzes images and provides recipes based on them. We also learned how to web scrape recipes from sites, such as AllRecipes.com, and search for videos on YouTube based on the image.

What's next for Ratatouille

In the future, we hope to implement a voice assistant and text-to-speech to make the instructions of the recipe as easy as possible (especially for those who have never cooked before to be able to cook it efficiently), recommend recipes to the user based on their past recipes, and provide an option to add dietary restrictions (so the recipes will suggest alternatives).