WegmansEats

Inspiration

When looking for inspiration for the University at Buffalo hackathon we were drawn towards the Wegmans and M&T challenges. To combine creating an Amazon Echo skill and incorporate it with the Wegmans API. When drawing ideas, we've collectively tried dozens of apps which fail to do what we aimed to do.

What it does

The goal as to build that combines the convenience of the Amazon Echo, and the new Wegmans API which aims to help its consumers in a plethora of ways. The skill was going to be a food inventory system which allowed the user who may be rushing out the door to create a great meal with the things they already have at home. On top of this, once they run out the ingredients will be added to their grocery list. On top of this, it would have allowed to dynamically add items to the inventory when the user uses Alexa's built-in shopping list to add whatever food item they checked off as getting right to the pantry. This would not only save time but allows the users to explore meals that they could create themselves!

How we built it

Using Amazon Developer Console (Attempted Lambda) and a secured ngrok tunnel which allows a safe connection from the Alexa device to the server. On the backend, we used Python 3 to manipulate and deliver the necessary data back to the user. Not only that, but the content could be changed on the daily, adapting to the user's preferences.

Challenges we ran into

Although requirements and user story gathering went well, Amazon skill services, lambda, and Flask-Ask (Python) all seemed to be troublesome. We adapted the best we could in the shortened timeframe and switched from Lambda to hosting on one of our machines (Securing it along the way). Several major errors prevented us to perform at our full capacity but we tried to the very end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After hours of tutorials and debugging, the moment when we got Amazon Echo to announce what we told it to do was a fantastic moment and helped us with the motivation in the final few hours to persevere.