Behind The Bot: Cooking Competition Creator Michael Gyarmathy

Whether you’re looking for a recipe suggestion, wine pairing or just want to chat with a celebrity chef, you’re in luck: there’s a bot for that.

With bots of all flavors flooding the market, the food space is particularly ripe for innovation as enterprising coders and food entrepreneurs try their hand at creating that virtual sous chef or grocery shopping assistant.

Here at the Spoon, we read and try out new foodbots all the time. In doing our research, we started to wonder about the people behind the bots and the choices they made in bringing their bot to market.

So, we decided to ask them.

This is our first in an occasional Q&A series with the person behind the bot. This first bot-maker is Michael Gyarmathy, the creator of an Alexa Skill called Cooking Competition.

Cooking Competition is a super basic skill that suggests a changing array of ingredient suggestions for you to test out your cooking skills. I tried it out on my own rather than facing off against friends, so I can being uses as a daily inspirational to come up with a cook-from-scratch meal ideas as much as for a competition with friends.

Whether you use Cooking Competition for ingredient suggestions or as a way to test your cooking prowess against friends, you can get started here.

Here’s our Q&A with Michael Gyarmathy:

Where did you get the idea for your Cooking Competition?

This Alexa skill is inspired by cooking competition TV shows such as Food Network’s Chopped. The concept is simple: compete with your friends in a test of culinary skill by coming up with dishes that incorporate the special “basket ingredients” provided by Alexa.