StoveSide: cook from the next step, not the screen

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady.

What I Built

When a recipe is long, cooking can turn into a cycle of touching the phone, scrolling, and finding the line you were on. StoveSide is a small hands-free recipe guide: paste a recipe you already trust, review Gemma’s short steps with source quotes, then have your browser read the current step aloud while you cook.

The aim is simple: make following a recipe feel a little calmer and keep the next step easy to find. StoveSide can also surface questions about ambiguous instructions. A timer appears when Gemma returns a duration; check it against the original recipe before using it.

Demo

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vZmR8WIu4WR2xkfzcchvyYpjZRZQePoA?usp=sharing]

Code

StoveSide on GitHub

How I Built It

StoveSide uses a dependency-free Node.js server, plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, browser speech synthesis, and hosted Gemma inference. The server asks Gemma to turn pasted recipe text into short steps with exact source excerpts. It checks that each excerpt appears in the input before returning the draft to the browser. The cook can review each step, listen to it, and optionally start its timer.

The test suite has three tests for source-quote validation, timer bounds, and invalid or empty results. These are software checks, not a measurement of model accuracy. The app is configured to use gemma-4-26b-a4b-it through Google’s hosted API. Verify a real request with a non-sensitive recipe and confirm the browser flow before publishing.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Gemma’s open weights give builders the freedom to adapt the model or choose a different way to run it. StoveSide currently uses hosted inference to keep setup lightweight; when someone requests steps, recipe text is sent to Google’s API. The app keeps the API key on its local server and does not write submitted recipe text to disk. A future local-inference option could keep recipes on the cook’s device, though I have not built or evaluated that mode yet.

StoveSide is a prototype, not a substitute for the original recipe or food-safety guidance. Generated steps can be wrong or incomplete, so review them against the source before cooking.