This is a submission for the Twilio Challenge
What I Built
A meal planning service that takes your meal plan request through WhatsApp messages, and send back your meal plan with recipes and all the important information: recipe url, image and source (the website that created the recipe). All of this achieved with the effortless magic of Twilio.
Demo
Send meal plan request to chatbot
Receive a reply that says the meal plan has been sent to your given
email address.
Receive your meal plan in the inbox 🥣
Here's how you can try out this app.
- Send a WhatsApp message to number
+14155238886with codefamily-main. This is Twilio's verified sandbox number. - Send a meal plan request in this format:
Your meal plan <your email>. For example, this message has been tested successfullypaleo vegan meal plan for 1 week <janedoe@gmail.com>Make sure that your message includes the greater than and less than symbols, and your email address is enclosed between them. You can omit "paleo vegan", or change to "x days", where x is a number less than 7, because Edamam only allows a certain number of recipes in each request. I'm only allocated 30 requests per day, so please try the above message once so that many people can enjoy this service. - You should get a success message. Wait for your meal plan to arrive in your inbox.
Twilio and AI
Meal plan is complicated and time-consuming. Each person has a certain preferences and dietary need. Making a meal plan service that can please many different human beings is a near impossible task.
You can look up online meal planning services and most of them will send the same plan to every one, unless you are prepared to pay a premium price.
How about leverage AI to make meal plan more accessible? There's an API on the market that does just that: the chatbot assistant from Edamam.
A diagram of the communication between WhatsApp user, this app and Edamam.
You don't see the name Twilio in the diagram, because it is the silent magician that does all the plumbing work. It allows me to process WhatsApp messages, respond to WhatsApp users and send helpful emails to them (a really big deal in the age of spams and frauds).
Additional Prize Categories
Twilio Times Two: I used two Twilio APIs, one for WhatsApp and the other for Sendgrid.
Impactful Innovators: I believe this online meal planning service will free people from that dreadful question comes every weeknight: What's for dinner?
Entertaining Endeavors: On the other hand, this meal planning service is not production ready yet. It may suggest that you have ice cream or rosemary oil for dinner. Besides, many food websites branch out into housekeeping. Occasionally, you may get recipes for furniture polish, or mulled-cider sachets. The Meal Planning API from Edamam is unable to tell if a recipe is safe for human consumption or not. While we wait for the Edamam API to mature, let's treat this app like something lighthearted to lighten up your Sunday blues.
<!-- Thanks for participating! →
Top comments (3)
Hello! It seems like an interesting project! If you remember me, I won a category in the challenge from Netlify, same as you... did you read the rules for competitions 🤔
If I remember correctly, you can only win once each six months... unless you are doing this like, for educational purposes maybe, then that's okay... by the way, you can reach me through Twitter (X) if you want to.
I did it because I had something I wanted to build really badly. The odd of winning a prize in these types of contests is so low anyway, so unless I have something I want to showcase, I'd rather do more open source projects.
Okay! I hope your projects succeed then! 💪😉