TastePilot Cultural Atlas — Your taste travels from Chennai to Bengaluru
Explore how changing your preferences reshapes your recommendations
Explore the connections between your taste preferences and new city discoveries
Discover places that match your taste, powered by Qloo taste intelligence

Inspiration

When we travel to a new city, finding places that match our personal tastes and cultural interests can be difficult. Generic recommendations often focus on what's popular rather than what feels right for us.

We asked ourselves: What if your taste could travel with you?

That question inspired TastePilot — a platform that helps people discover new places by translating their taste preferences across cities.

What It Does

TastePilot uses Qloo's taste intelligence to help users explore culturally relevant discoveries in a destination city based on familiar preferences.

For example, a user can explore how their taste in Chennai might translate into new discoveries in Bengaluru.

Key features include:

Taste Translation: Explore taste-informed recommendations across cities.
Cultural Atlas: Discover connections between familiar preferences and new destinations through a visual experience.
What-If Exploration: Compare alternative discovery scenarios.
GroupTaste: Explore shared discovery possibilities for groups.
Explainability: Help users understand the context behind their discoveries.

How We Built It

We built TastePilot as a web application using React, TypeScript, and Vite, with Qloo's API powering taste-informed discovery. We designed a distinctive Cultural Atlas interface to make the journey between familiar tastes and new discoveries intuitive and engaging.

We also worked on API integration, responsive layouts, application testing, and deployment so that people can access the project through a live web demo.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was turning the abstract concept of taste translation into a practical and understandable user experience. We needed to connect city-based discovery, personal preferences, and recommendation results without making the interface feel complicated.

We also had to ensure that API integration, result handling, and the overall application experience worked reliably together.

What We Learned

Building TastePilot helped us explore how taste intelligence can make discovery more personal and culturally relevant. We learned that recommendations can do more than identify popular places — they can help people use familiar interests as a starting point for exploring somewhere new.

We also gained experience in integrating an external API, designing a distinctive user interface, testing application workflows, and deploying a working web application.

What's Next

We aim to expand destination coverage, improve personalization, and make recommendation explanations more useful. Our long-term vision is to help people feel connected to a new city through the tastes and interests they already love.

TastePilot — Your taste travels with you.