Food Buddy

Food Buddy is an Alexa Skill that tracks the nutritional content of your meals from its ingredients as you cook!

Contents:

• Getting Started
• How to Use
• Testing
• Acknowledgments and Development Notes
• Demo

Getting Started

Visit the Alexa Skill Store and search for "Food Buddy" Skill, which has the following App ID:

amzn1.ask.skill.f7574c4a-fe13-47d7-b1a5-34a199aacf04

then, you can enable this Skill on your Alexa device!

How to Use

Launch

Start the Food Buddy Skill by saying,

"Alexa, open Food Buddy."

You can also jump straight into the conversation with Food Buddy by saying,

"Alexa, ask food buddy to _____"

followed by any of the following intents.

Add an ingredient

Once the Skill is launched, you can add an ingredient by specifying it's quantity and the food item. For example, you can say:

"Add ten ounces of spinach."

or

"Put in one cup of tomatoes."

or

"Include fifty grams of chicken."

Alexa will then report the number of calories in your item item and add it to your meal!

Remove an ingredient

To remove the item that was most recently added to your meal, just say

"Remove."

or

"Take out the last ingredient."

List current ingredients

To hear a list of all items added to your meal so far, followed by the Calorie count for each, you can ask Food Buddy,

"What ingredients have I added?"

or

"Tell me what's in my recipe."

Nutritional Summary

Food Buddy can give you a summary of the Calorie and macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate, fat) breakdown of your meal! Just ask,

"What's my summary?"

or

"Give me the final report."

Exit

Just say

"Stop."

or

"Exit"

to end your current session.

Notes (regarding Skill use)

• Once the session ends, whether by unexpected error, exiting the Skill, or timing out after not receiving a response, your current meal and all ingredients added so far will be removed. I am currently working on setting up a persistent database that will allow the Skill to keep track of ingredients, meals, and food items across multiple sessions.

• This skill was not intended for use with an Echo Show. I plan to add a visual component (for both Echo Show and the mobile Amazon Alexa app that would provide additional functionality.

Testing

This skill was tested with three methods:

1. Automated unit testing using a Mocha testing framework
2. Testing JSON requests in the Lambda function
3. Verbal testing on an Echo device.

Running the Mocha tests

• First, make sure you have Node.js (and npm) installed on your computer.
• Then, ensure that the Mocha testing framework is installed. If you don't have it, you can get it by running the following from the command line:

npm install mocha

• The node module used for mocking an Alexa conversation, "alexa-conversation", is included in this repo. You can also install it yourself by running:

npm install --save-dev alexa-conversation

Then, using the provided testing file, you can run the tests with:

mocha testing.js

Feel free to add more unit tests! Documentation on the "alexa-conversation" framework can be found with this link

Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKBjWrvN7A

Acknowledgments and Development Notes

• Developers: Christopher Jereza, Emily Lo, Stephanie Zhang, and Michelle Hamilton
• UX and Logo Design: Scott Yu-Jan
• Brainstormed, designed, developed, and deployed on July 21, 2017 at the 10-hour "Amazon Global Intern Hackathon"

Built With

• AWS Lambda
• Alexa Developer Portal
• USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory API