Monthly Archives: August 2017

What should I cook tonight?

The question that dooms everyone (every evening), unless one loves eating out every single night. I didn’t particularly try hard to answer this question, but its indeed a real-world problem and someone, somewhere in the world is probably writing a ML algorithm to solve it. He/she may as well arrive at solution to help them buy right stuff to stock in advance and computer bots can work with robotics arms to cook it. It’s not available to utilize these as just API’s now and I am not a brilliant coder to start coding it from starch.

Design engineer Brian Conti from North Carolina has created magnetic strips called bottleLoft to hold beer bottles in fridges (shown). They stick to the top of the fridge and hold up to six bottles. The device can be bought for £12 ($20) and is currently on Kickstarter

While someone makes that massive effort, there probably is a reasonable solution:-

Alexa

What if, Alexa recommends with option to cook in the order, when food is about to expire: –

  • Smoked Salmon
  • Chicken Briyani
  • Aloo-gobi or Indian style potato and cauliflower

How can this work?

  1. We all know smart fridge exist and I have seen one from LG that suggests what all is going to go bad(expire) soon.
  2. Once Alexa knows this information, It can give some recommendations and then find recipe options for you.
  3. Bingo now the easy stuff – Alexa read out the recipe and people have already done this.

After writing this article I realized – someone has attempted this already in a hackathon however it’s not yet live, so my assumption is someone is already working on it.

There are also some other real world problems which can be solved with similar data set: –

  • Alexa can ask you what all you may like to eat next week and build up a glossary list for next week based on what already in the fridge.
  • You like something on street , Click a photo of something you want to make at home- Alexa tells-> Oops – missing ingredients e.g low quantity of milk, let Alexa add this in your list.

If you find other good use-cases of this data-set, feel free to comment.