Foodie fooderson a conversational agent for the smart kitchen
Prashanti Priya Angara, Miguel Jiménez, Kirti Agarwal, Harshit Jain, Roshni Jain, Ulrike Stege, Sudhakar Ganti, Hausi A. Müller, Joanna Ng · Computer Science and Software Engineering · 2017
Conversational agents aim to offer an alternative to traditional methods for humans to engage with technology. This can mean reducing the effort to complete a task using reasoning capabilities and by exploiting context, or allow voice interaction when traditional methods are not available or inconvenient. This paper introduces Foodie Fooderson, a conversational kitchen assistant built using IBM Watson technology. Foodie minimizes food wastage by optimizing the use of groceries and assist families in improving their eating habits through recipe recommendations taking into account personal context, such as allergies and dietary goals, while helping reduce food waste and managing grocery budgets. This paper discusses Foodie's architecture, use and benefits. Foodie uses services from CAPRecipes---our context-aware personalized recipe recommender system, SmarterContext---our personal context management system, and selected publicly available nutrition databases. Foodie reasons using IBM Watson's conversational services to recognize users' intents and understand events related to the users and their context. We also discuss our experiences in building conversational agents with Watson, including desired features that may improve the development experience with Watson for creating rich conversations in this exciting era of cognitive computing.