What I Built
My Dadi, Savitri Devi, has cooked for our family for decades and has never written a single recipe down. Ask her for measurements and you get "thoda sa namak, jab tak rang badal na jaye." When she's gone, those recipes go with her.
So I built Dadi's Recipe Book. She records voice memos in Hindi while she cooks, and the tool turns them into a clean, printable recipe book. It transcribes the audio, structures it into ingredients and steps, and flags every vague amount ("thoda", "andaaz se", "ek mutthi") so I can ask her about it later instead of guessing.
Demo
[Add a screenshot of a Hindi transcript turning into a structured recipe, or a short video of it running with the wifi off]
Code
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How I Built It
Everything runs locally on my laptop, with no cloud API anywhere:
-
Speech-to-text: Whisper (
medium) via faster-whisper, with the language set to Hindi (hi) - Recipe structuring: Qwen 2.5 (7B) running through Ollama
- Export: a Python script that builds a PDF with her name, photo, and recipes
The LLM prompt is written to keep her own Hindi phrasing instead of rewriting it into generic recipe-speak, and to mark any vague quantity as "Dadi se poochna hai" rather than inventing a number.
What went wrong: [Write one real failure, e.g. "Whisper small mangled dish names like baingan bharta, so I switched to medium."]
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
- Her voice stays private. These are recordings of a family elder. They never leave my machine, and no server I don't control ever hears them.
- It works offline. I ran it at her house with no internet, on a laptop, while she was cooking.
- I could swap models when something broke. When [real example: Whisper misheard a dish name / the LLM over-corrected her style], I changed the model size and edited the prompt. With a closed API, I couldn't have touched what's underneath.
- It costs nothing to run, so the book can keep growing with every recipe she shares.
The Handover
I gave Dadi the printed book on [date]. Her reaction: "[her actual words]"
What's Next
More recipes, a copy for each cousin, and voice search so anyone can ask "how did Dadi make kadhi?"
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