What should I have for dinner?

Alexa, ask Dinner Bot, What's for dinner?

Inspiration

One's ability to make decisions is extremely weak after a long day. Or sometimes when we are in a group of people, we just can't decide what to eat. So, we decided Alexa to help us make a decision.

What it does

Once the user asks, using a simple phrase like "what's for dinner?". It outputs a random food choice to cook/order.

How we built it

We made a Skill for Alexa on the AWS Developer Portal. The main Lambda Function consists if the sequences of steps to follow. The main function chooses a random dinner option from a list of dinner options and outputs the response. The Lambda Function code is written in Python 2.7. We use the random library for the project. The Lambda Function interacts with the Indents which is in JSON format and Occurrences that are the phrases the user can say to interact with the skill.

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time understanding how to actually create and test skills on the Amazon developer portal. We also needed a particular handler to import some functions that initialize the program. It kept giving us errors for a long time but eventually figured it out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finding out the bug that took us the longest and interrupted the program from running. We were also happy that we learned so many new skills in so little time with only 2 members on our team as 1 quit early on in the project.

What we learned

We did not know Python or how to program Alexa using AWS services. We learned both from scratch.

What's next for What should I have for dinner?

We are thinking of integrating a feature in which the user can tell Alexa how much time they have, what ingredients and Alexa will output a dinner option they can make with the available resources along with the option of the recipe of the food suggested.