Problem solving on the weekend — how this engineer used his “superpower” to overcome an everyday cooking challenge.
Picture the scene — it’s a normal evening for Stan, one of our Android engineers. He opens Cookpad to find his favourite cottage cheese pancakes recipe and starts cooking dinner. Everything’s going smoothly until he needs to scroll to the next step in the recipe and realises that his hands are covered in pancake mixture.
In truth this wasn’t the first time he’d faced this problem, nor was it the first time he’d felt frustrated. But, this time he was determined to find a solution!
As a frequent Alexa user, Stan knew that voice enabled tech could help, but with global penetration of smart speakers still relatively low, he was sure that an in-app smartphone solution would be better.
“I wanted visual representations of my commands,” he explained. But my Alexa doesn’t have a screen, whereas I thought that if I could find a way to combine usual touch-screen interaction and voice commands, I’d have a really powerful solution.”
Excited for the challenge ahead, Stan considered how to take forward his idea.
“I thought about sharing it with the team at Cookpad to see if I could make the case to run an experiment. But, deep down I wanted to find my own solution. Not everyone is lucky enough to have what I call ‘the engineer’s superpower’ — an ability to build real solutions and make your everyday ideas a reality!”
It’s worth adding at this point that most Cookpad team members are avid problem solvers, and quite a few of them are a little crazy too, so it’s no surprise that Stan decided to take matters into his own hands.
He spent the next weekend researching various mobile apps which already use voice recognition technology. He found quite a few, including another cooking app which proved that a voice bot was a viable feature — so far so good!
However, a little more research uncovered a significant hurdle — so-called ‘wake words’. The words you use to wake up a device, like ‘Hey Alexa’!
“I quickly realised that the giants like Google make it impossible to develop custom wake words using their technology, so I knew I was going to have to get creative.”
“Reminding myself that my goal was to prove the viability of the concept, not come up with a fully fledged solution, I soon found an old, low-quality, unmaintained option which did exactly what I needed it to. Better still, it was free!”
After a couple more weekends of development, Stan had a viable proof of concept… and here it is!
So, what’s next for Stan’s ‘side project’?
“The initial prototype received great feedback from Cookpad colleagues — I was really pleased. To be honest, I don’t know what will happen with it in the future! But, for now I’m just going to keep working on improvements and see what happens.”
At Cookpad, we’re always on the lookout for highly talented problem solvers to join our team. It takes a certain mix of creativity, ingenuity and crazy to create solutions on the scale. If that sounds like you, check out our open roles.
