Gordon

Inspiration

The inspiration for our project, Gordon, comes from our individual experiences. We have close bonds with our countries of origin, having learned their languages and integrated into their cultures. However, cooking is one outlet we've found to express ourselves in a way that no other can. From Indian food to Turkish food to a fusion of the two, we've found joy in cuisine and seeing our efforts materialize in real time (much to the enjoyment of others). We aim to foster meaningful connections and empower our users to learn about their cultures, enjoy food, and deepen their connections with others.

What It Does

With Gordon, we empower our users to broaden their horizons. Our homepage is minimalist for a reason - the recipes you can choose from are endless. All you need to do is enter what you want to make and who you want to make it for. Let us do the rest. We'll generate a beautiful recipe preview for you to consider if you made the right decision, and if you're satisfied, we'll walk you through each step of the recipe with Gordon Ramsey's voice telling you what to do! We've intentionally made our recipe database incredibly detailed, allowing you to pick virtually every cuisine with an online recipe. With Gordon, you have the power to create, and the choice is yours to make.

How We Built It

We built our application using a multitude of services/frameworks/tools:

Reflex.dev for the core client front-end
Google Gemini API to generate a unique recipe
Groq API G1 Implementation to make each recipe step more readable/understandable
Cartesia API to implement text-to-speech on each recipe step
OpenAI DALL-E to generate a picture of the desired final dish

Challenges We Ran Into

Navigating new services was difficult, especially because we changed our stack multiple times. We switched from Next.js and FastAPI to Reflex.dev and a complete Python front-end and back-end. We also initially decided to use Hume API but switched to other voice providers (like Cartesia/Deepgram) after hours of difficulty.
We read a lot of documentation, since this was the first time we used Reflex.dev or any of the APIs. It took a lot of time and focused programming to get Gordon working.
We stayed awake for a long time and ensured we shipped the best product over the weekend.
Working with abysmal internet throughout the hackathon (we believe it cost us a few hours of valuable development time).

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Finishing our product (in the nick of time)! We were proud of our progress in such a short amount of time and cannot wait to show people what we've done!
Learned a bunch of new technologies I might have never heard of without CalHacks
Coded efficiently for an exorbitant amount of time (for just a few days)

What We Learned

Tools are incredible! An excellent API implementation goes a long way in making your product unforgettable.
Get your sleep!
Working together and managing a ton of branches and commits simultaneously.