Top Dish: Your Cooking Journey 🧑🏻🍳
Inspiration
Cooking is one of the most creative things we do every day, but it can also be intimidating. Recipes are often scattered everywhere—in messy handwritten cards, bookmarked PDFs, long YouTube videos, or voice memos we recorded while inspired. I wanted to build TopDish to bridge that gap. Our goal was to create a friendly, premium space where anyone—from a total beginner to a seasoned home chef—could unlock the secrets of other people’s cookbooks and feel empowered to experiment.
What it does
TopDish is your culinary co-pilot. It’s not just a place to store recipes; it's a tool for creation.
- Smart Import: You can literally "drop" a file—be it a video, a photo of a napkin, a PDF, or a voice recording—and our AI will extract a perfect, structured recipe.
- Recipe Remixing (Forking): See a recipe you like? "Fork" it! This allows you to take a basic dish and create your own innovative variations based on what you have in your kitchen.
- Video Guided Cooking: For those who learn by watching, we support high-quality video sessions with auto-generated chapters and ingredient mapping.
How I built it
I poured a lot of love into the tech stack to make TopDish feel premium:
- Flutter: For a gorgeous, responsive UI that works everywhere and native compatibility with iOS and Android devices (required for audio manipulation).
- Google Gemini AI: The "brains" behind our multimodal extraction. It reads your PDFs, watches your videos, and listens to your voice to build recipes.
- Firebase: Powering our secure data, authentication, and cloud storage.
- RevenueCat: Managing our subscriptions so I can keep the platform growing while keeping core creation free for everyone.
- Mux: For rock-solid video streaming and automated captioning.
- Custom Wake Word: I trained a custom wake word to detect your call during cooking sessions, "Hey Chef!" will invoke the assistant to ask whatever you need without touching the phone.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest technical hurdle was getting the "Hey Cheff!" wake word just right. I wanted you to keep your hands on the cooking and avoid touching the screen whenever possible, but making voice activation work reliably in a noisy kitchen is tough! I had to tackle built-in noise and echo cancellation while ensuring the "always-on" listening didn't murder your battery life.
On the AI side, the "Smart Import" pipeline was also a challenge. Getting Gemini to reliably distinguish between a tiny ingredient note and a step instruction across different file types (like a messy photo vs. a voice recording) took a lot of careful prompt engineering. I also put a ton of thought into the "Unified Editor"—making it feel like a fun game rather than a data entry form was a balancing act.
Accomplishments that I proud of
I am incredibly proud of the cooking session experience. It’s designed to be smooth and immersive, letting you focus on the food while the app handles the rest. I also love how the AI assistant has turned out—it’s not just for importing; it’s there to guide you through every step, answering questions and making sure you feel confident. Seeing a messy voice memo or a quick photo turn into a structured, publishable recipe in seconds still gives me goosebumps!
What I learned
I learned that the best tools don't just solve problems; they inspire creativity. By removing the friction of manual data entry, I realized people are much more likely to share their culinary "secrets." I also discovered how powerful multimodal AI can be when it’s focused on helping people do something they love—like cooking a great meal for their family.
What's next for Top Dish: Your Cooking Journey
The journey is just beginning! I have big plans:
- Pantry Intelligence: AI that suggests variations based exactly on the ingredients you have left in your fridge.
- Family Cooking: I want to add a Family Subscription so you can sahre grocery lists, private recipes and have a cooking poll!
- Gamified Mastery: Earn badges and "Chef Levels" as you master new techniques and cuisines.
Grab your apron—it's time to cook something amazing! 🍳✨
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