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Recipeek

(Submission for UofTHacks2018)

Know what you eat

Synopsis

Our project allows users to set their dietary restrictions, whether that may be allergies, ingredients they prefer not to eat, or lifestyle choices such as "vegetarian", or even "halal" food. We even have support to look up diets the user can take on and add to their lifestyle.

How we built it

This project is an application based on Google Action and Dialogue Flow to provide users with an easy-to-use interface to store and manage their dietary restrictions. Our backend uses Python and 2 Food APIs (Food Essentials USDA) to request ingredient lists and food categories that are checked against the user's inputted dietary restrictions.

Inspiration

Our goal was to create an application that people could use on a daily basis, and since food is an essential part of everyone's lives, we found it was the perfect opportunity to use Google Action to develop something that would be easy-to-use and personalized. Many people around us have dietary restrictions, and find it difficult to look up whether certain foods conform to those restrictions, and we wanted to provide an easy way for people to do that, while also taking this as an opportunity to explore new frameworks and platforms such as the Google Home.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was configuring the food APIs to handle basic food ingredients as well as different food categories that were part of a person's dietary restrictions (e.g. Meat/Dairy). We also had a bit of trouble configuring Dialogue flow and Google Action for collaborators at the start but this turned out to be a minor issue.

Accomplishments

The biggest accomplishment we have, and the main thing we are proud of, is that we were able to define an MVP and stick to it before expanding. We managed to come up with a fairly simple but useful concept and then build on it when we had finalized the MVP. For example, we added an additional feature to list and get information on additional available diets, and while we only currently have suport for one, it was someting we were able to add after implementing a stable base solution.

Coming Soon!

While we haven't submitted out Google Action for review by the end of UofTHacks2018, we are expecting to have it reviewed and hopefully released very soon!