8/11

Two features added! You can now ask my skill to repeat the step last heard, or repeat the ingredient last heard. Both have been tested, and all changes are up on github. My skill is done! I'm going to submit it to Amazon for review and hopefully it'll soon be a real app!

8/10

My cooking test went very well today. I'm happy with how my skill has ended up, but I did realize I never added a feature to repeat or go backwards a step. I added this today, but I'm having a few issues with it, so I'll continue to work on that tomorrow.

8/9

More testing of my skill. I switched back and forth between the two methods for finding a specific ingredient (one of which is more simple and one of which uses fuzzy matching) and both are working very well. I've stuck with the first one, because It's a lot more simple and I don't think there are many differences. I was testing through the AWS console and through my Alexa at home and I'm pleased with how this skill is shaping up. I think most of the bugs I was finding earlier really had to do with the shortcomings of my ingredient text file.

There will obviously be bugs that will arise, but I tested about 10 different recipes (ranging from simple to complicated, recipes that used name brand ingredients, savory dishes, and sweet dishes) and all of the ingredients were found without a problem.

Tomorrow I'm going to cook again using my Alexa and make sure there aren't any last flaws, but I think other than that, I'm done with my project! I'll blog tomorrow about my cooking test and unless I find something that needs fixing, I'm going to call it good and try to submit my skill to Amazon!!

8/8

I've finished processing my new ingredient file and I think it's a lot better than my previous one! There are a lot more ingredients and I spent a lot more time getting out the filler words that only mess with getting the ingredient. During my testing today, I already notice it having better results.

I also have been working on the logic in my code. I'm getting rid of plurals and I'm going to add a few more loops in to ensure that if they ask for an ingredient that's in their recipe, it'll actually be found!

8/5

Woke up at 6 am this morning with a vision towards fixing the ingredient issue! I'd been working on splitting up the different words in my current ingredient file so it would fit a more broad range of my recipes but then I realized that I could just go through each of my recipes and get all the ingredients to ensure that I would have them all. I used multithreading to connect to every recipe in my MASTER_RECIPE.txt file and have now gotten a list of all their ingredients. Now I just have to process it down to get rid of the numbers, non ingredient words, etc. Luckily, I still have all the logic written from the last time I did it. I also came up with a way to search it better, so hopefully it'll soon be working for every ingredient!

8/4

I didn't work on my skill today.

8/3

Worked on the ingredient issue today. I tried to look for any other alexa skills that used recipes, hoping that they would have either their ingredient slot list available or at least a source for where they got theirs. I only found one, and they had only hard coded 10 recipes. I'll just keep thinking about how to solve this problem, especially using the advice from the previous comments on my blog.