Eric Levine


A recipe assistant for Amazon's Alexa Platform

Chef: Your recipe companion.

Chef is an Alexa skill that reads recipes back to you.

Purpose

I cook a lot. More often than not, it's a recipe I've never made before. Hands are dirty, and always needing clarification on ingredient amounts and next steps. Looking at some of the available Alexa skills, I couldn't find something simple that read recipe ingredients and steps back to you (other than the Allrecipes one which appeared proprietary).

Tech involved

  • Amazon Alexa SDK - No avoiding it when making a Alexa skill!
  • Amazon Lambda - The function that executes everytime you invoke the Chef skill
  • Amazon DynamoDB - NoSQL database containing users' recipes

Takeaways / Improvements

  • Due to the way Alexa handles sessions, I had to store the current recipe as a flag in the database to retain state across requests.

  • If this were to be rolled out to the Alexa Skills store, there would be a need to namespace recipe collections in the database so that multiple users can use the skill. Right now it works well with one Amazon user.