WeeklyWheel — meal planning on Alexa+

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for WeeklyWheel — meal planning on Alexa+

Inspiration

We noticed that many people struggle with the mental load of daily meal planning and budgeting. We wanted to create a solution that utilizes the enhanced capabilities of Alexa+ to make this process effortless. Our goal was to transform a tedious chore into a conversational experience.

What it does

WeeklyWheel allows users to generate entire weekly meal plans based on their preferences and dietary constraints. It integrates directly with Alexa+ to provide verbal suggestions and manage grocery lists. The system ensures that users stay on track while minimizing food waste.

How we built it

We built the backend using Go and FastAPI, deploying the services on Amazon ECS Fargate for scalable compute. We utilized Amazon SageMaker to power the recommendation engine that suggests recipes. The interface interface is built using the Amazon Alexa SDK to handle complex voice interactions.

Challenges we ran into

We found it challenging to map the Go-based logic with the FastAPI wrappers while maintaining high performance. We also struggled initially to ensure the voice responses felt natural within the specific Alexa+ environment. Tuning the SageMaker models for more relevant meal suggestions took significant iterative testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the seamless low-latency response times we achieved using ECS Fargate. The integration between SageMaker and the Alexa+ interface provides highly accurate personalized plans. We successfully implemented a robust logic machine that handles multi-turn planning conversations.

What we learned

We learned a lot about optimizing Go microservices for containerized environments on AWS. We also gained deep insights into how to design conversational flows specifically for the Alexa+ track. Understanding the nuances of SageMaker deployment helped us improve our ML pipeline.

What's next for WeeklyWheel

We plan to integrate real-time grocery pricing APIs to provide budget estimates. We also want to add social features where multiple family members can coordinate their WeeklyWheel. Expanding the SageMaker models to include nutritional tracking is our next top priority.

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• amazon-ecs-fargate
• fastapi
• meal
• sagemaker
• weeklywheel