Plate-O | Devpost

Smart Delivery Recommendation App Imagined
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Inspiration Behind Plate-O 🍽️

The inspiration for Plate-O comes from the intersection of convenience, financial responsibility, and the joy of discovering new meals. We all love ordering takeout, but there’s often that nagging question: “Can I really afford to order out again?” For many, budgeting around food choices can be stressful and time-consuming, yet essential for maintaining a healthy balance between indulgence and financial well-being. 🍔💡

Our goal with Plate-O was to create a seamless solution that alleviates this burden while still giving users the excitement of variety and novelty in their meals. We wanted to bridge the gap between smart personal finance and the spontaneity of food discovery, making it easier for people to enjoy new restaurants without worrying about breaking the bank. 🍕✨

What makes Plate-O truly special is its ability to learn from your habits and preferences, ensuring each recommendation is not only financially responsible but tailored to your unique tastes. By combining AI, personal finance insights, and your love for good food, we created a tool that makes managing your takeout spending effortless, leaving you more time to enjoy the experience. Bon Appétit! 📊🍽️

How We Built Plate-O 🛠️

At the core of Plate-O is its AI-driven recommendation engine, designed to balance two crucial factors: your financial well-being and your culinary preferences. Here’s how we made it happen: Backend: We used FastAPI to build a robust system for handling the user’s financial data, preferences, and restaurant options. By integrating the Capital One API, Plate-O can analyze your income, expenses, and savings to calculate an ideal takeout budget—maximizing enjoyment while minimizing financial strain. 💵📈

Frontend: Next.js powers our intuitive user interface. Users input their budget, and with just a few clicks, they get a surprise restaurant pick that fits their financial and taste profile. Our seamless UI makes ordering takeout a breeze. 📱✨

Data Handling & Preferences: MongoDB Atlas is our choice for managing user preferences—storing restaurant ratings, past orders, dietary restrictions, and other critical data. This backend allows us to constantly learn from user feedback and improve recommendations with every interaction. 📊🍴

AI & Recommendation System: Using Tune’s LLM-powered API, we process natural language inputs and preferences to predict what food users will love based on past orders and restaurant descriptions. The system evaluates each restaurant using criteria like sustainability scores, delivery speed, cost, and novelty. 🎯🍽️

Surprise Meal Feature: The magic happens when the system orders a surprise meal for users within their financial constraints. Plate-O delights users by taking care of the decision-making and getting better with each order. 🎉🛍️

Challenges We Overcame at Plate-O 🚧

-Budgeting Complexity: One of our first hurdles was integrating the Capital One API in a meaningful way. We had to ensure that our budgeting model accounted for users’ income, expenses, and savings in real-time. This required significant computation beyond the API and iteration to create a seamless experience. 💰⚙️

Recommendation Fine-Tuning: Balancing taste preferences with financial responsibility wasn’t easy. Most consumer dining preference data is proprietary, forcing us to spend a lot of time refining the recommendation system to ensure it could accurately predict what users would enjoy with small amounts of data, leveraging open-source Large Language Models to improve results over time. 🤖🎯

-Data Integration: Gathering and analyzing user preference data in real-time presented technical challenges, particularly when optimizing the system to handle large restaurant datasets efficiently while providing quick recommendations. Combining two distinct datasets, the Yelp restaurant datalist and an Uber Eats csv also required a bit of Word2Vec ingenuity. 🗄️⚡

Accomplishments at Plate-O 🏆

-Smart Budgeting with AI: Successfully implemented a model that combines personal finance data with restaurant preferences, offering tailored recommendations that help users stay financially savvy while enjoying variety in their takeout. 📊🍕

- Novel User Experience: Plate-O’s surprise meal feature takes the stress out of decision-making, delighting users with thoughtful recommendations that evolve with their taste profile. The platform bridges convenience and personalized dining experiences like never before. 🚀🥘

Lessons Learned from Plate-O’s Journey 📚

-Simplicity Wins: At first, we aimed to include many complex features, but we quickly realized that simplicity and focus lead to a more streamlined and effective user experience. It’s better to do one thing exceptionally well—help users order takeout wisely. 🌟🍽️

-The Power of Learning: A key takeaway was understanding the importance of iterative learning in both our recommendation engine and product development process. Every user interaction provided valuable insights that made Plate-O better. 🔄💡

-Balancing Functionality and Delight: Creating a tool that is both functional and delightful requires finding a perfect balance between user needs and technical feasibility. With Plate-O, we learned to merge practicality with the joy of food discovery. 💼🎉

The Future of Plate-O 🌟

-Groceries and Beyond: We envision expanding Plate-O beyond takeout, integrating grocery shopping and other spending categories into the platform to help users make smarter financial choices across their food habits. 🛒📊

-Real-Time AI Assistance: In the future, we plan to leverage AI agents that proactively guide users through their food budgeting journey, offering suggestions and optimizations for both takeout and groceries. 🤖🍱

-Social Good: While we already take environmental protection into account when recommending restaurants, we’re excited to explore adding complete restaurant ESG scores to help users make socially responsible dining choices, supporting local businesses and environmentally friendly options. 🌍🍽️

With Plate-O, we're not just changing how you order takeout; we're helping you become a more financially savvy foodie, one delicious meal at a time.