Kitchen Companion

Hammad Bin Sajjad — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:01:33 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

Kitchen Companion — a kitchen assistant for my mother, who kept asking me the same question over WhatsApp: "Mere paas aloo, tamatar aur thora chawal bacha hai — kya banaun?"

Her fridge is a moving target: leftovers, half-used things, whatever she bought that week. So I built her an app where she photographs her fridge, fixes the detected ingredient list on screen (the vision model sometimes "sees" things that aren't there — she removes those with one tap), and then chats with a warm kitchen companion that suggests meals in Roman Urdu — Urdu written in Latin letters, the way Pakistanis actually text. She can follow up by typing or speaking ("steps chahiye", "tamatar nahi hai", "guests aa rahe hain"), and the ingredient list and suggestions stay in sync as the conversation evolves.

It solves the actual problem: "what can I cook with THIS, right now" — not a generic recipe search engine.

Demo

Video Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CaxfYjIUAkL_-7jGiiiQ0QuF2bavQP8z/view?usp=drive_link

Code

hammadbinsajjad / Kitchen-Companion

Kitchen Companion

Photograph your fridge, fix the detected ingredient list on screen, and get meal suggestions in Roman Urdu from a kitchen companion chatbot that answers typed and spoken follow-ups.

All AI runs locally on your laptop via llama.cpp — zero cloud calls at runtime.

Run it

Start the model server (first run downloads the model from Hugging Face):
```
./run_model.sh
```

Start the app (separate terminal):

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/uvicorn server:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

On your phone (same Wi-Fi): open http://<laptop-ip>:8000.

How it works

One AI endpoint, POST /api/chat:

images attached → vision turn: returns the detected ingredient list
text / audio clip → conversation turn: Roman Urdu reply + the full current ingredient list (so spoken or typed corrections like "tamatar nahi hai" update the chips; manual chip ✕ / + add work too)
images + text/audio → vision turn that also…

View on GitHub

Zero build tooling: plain HTML/JS frontend served by a small FastAPI backend that talks to llama.cpp. One command starts the model, one starts the app.

How I Built It

Model: Gemma 4 E4B (QAT GGUF) running via llama.cpp's llama serve on my laptop — chosen because it's natively multimodal: the same model handles vision (fridge photos) and audio (spoken follow-ups). No speech-to-text layer anywhere — her voice goes straight into the model as input_audio, and the browser records/re-encodes it to WAV with vanilla JS.
One endpoint: the whole app is a single POST /api/chat. The request shape decides the turn — images attached = vision turn, text/audio = conversation turn, both = a vision turn that also acknowledges the note. No intent classifier, no agent framework — routing that can be read off the request metadata should never be inferred.
Structured output: every response is schema-constrained JSON {reply, dishes, ingredients}. Dish suggestions are separate objects rendered as tappable cards (tap = "steps chahiye"), and the ingredient list rides along in every turn so conversational corrections ("chawal nahi hai") update the chips. Plus defensive parsing for the real world: brace-residue stripping, truncation salvage, case-insensitive dedupe.
Human-in-the-loop by design: the edited chip list — not the raw model output — feeds the suggestion pass. The model proposes; my mother disposes.
Stateless backend: conversation history lives in the frontend and is re-sent every turn. Config lives in exactly two files (config.py / config.js).
Tested mobile-first in DevTools responsive mode for Pixel 8/9 (412 x 915); my mother's phone is the real target.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Because the model is open and runs locally, every photo she takes — her kitchen, her cupboards, the inside of her fridge — never leaves her home network. No cloud, no uploads, no server somewhere holding her family's life in a data center. What's in her fridge is nobody's business but her own, and open weights are the only way that's possible.

And it just keeps working. No internet? No problem — the laptop on her Wi-Fi is the entire system. The app doesn't care if the connection drops, if a service is down for maintenance, or if a provider changes its pricing overnight. For a tool that lives in the busiest room of a house and gets used daily by my mother, that reliability isn't a nice-to-have; it's the whole point.

A closed API would have meant mailing her kitchen photos to someone else's server on every single use — and a companion that dies the moment the connection does. Open innovation made this private and hers — which was the entire point of building for a friend.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma

DEV Community: Hammad Bin Sajjad

Kitchen Companion

What I Built

Demo

Code

hammadbinsajjad / Kitchen-Companion

Kitchen Companion

Run it

How it works

How I Built It

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Prize Categories