An Alexa Startup Story with Klove Chef

10/23/18 • 29 min

In this episode, Teri once again welcomes Bahubali Shete and Mario Rodriguez of Klove Chef. They talk about being a startup in the voicefirst world, and how it is important to continue to innovate at lightning speed.

Welcome Bahubali Shete and Mario Rodriguez!

Today we welcome Bahabali and Mario back to the podcast. They first appeared on Episode 44. Today we talk about their experience of being a startup company in the voicefirst world. As a reminder, Bahubali Shete is the co-founder and CEO of Klove Chef and Mario Rodriguez is its Chief Culinary Officer. Klove Chef is a voice-guided cooking assistant that helps keep your hands free for cooking, while giving you relevant cooking tips.

Klove Chef

Klove Chef is a conversational solution which takes consumers through meal planning, recipe discovery, buying ingredients and cooking with the support of a conversational assistant.
Focusing on becoming the primary interface for consumers in the kitchen.
Includes a chat bot feature.
Facilitates an easier cooking experience for home cooks by giving them chef tips, hacks and tricks.
It is available in Canada! Yeah!

A startup in the Voice Tech space: The challenges and successes

There’s great difficulty in trying to come up with languages and terminology that fits users in different countries (with diverse cultures).
It takes much longer for people like potential investors and early adopters to understand a Voice Technology product/solution.
Klove Chef is consistently getting 5-Star reviews because early adopters love it, once they try it out.
Kove Chef is building up their recipe database.
They recently participated at the Smart Kitchen Summit; the “Sears of Food Technology.”
Klove Chef is the only Voice First cooking solution in the Food Tech space. It has created numerous partnership opportunities.
A New feature, RecipeBox, enables users to add their own recipes through either voice or chat bots. They can then convert them into speakable recipes on Alexa and Google Home. They are currently accepting beta signups for RecipeBox.
Klove Chef is building a community of people who interact with Klove Chef on a daily basis while sharing their home recipes with each other.
A one-stop shop for culinary questions: Klove Chef plans to offer a Q&A solution for users.
Forging partnerships with companies that will add other elements of functionality to Klove Chef is another goal.
The partners are helping diversify the types of recipes, and develop compatibilities with certain devices and appliances that have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth functionality.
The Mealkits partnership: Klove Chef helps Mealkits consumers with any problems they have during the cooking process, while also enabling them to provide feedback on the experience. Mealkit companies are able to get unmatched in-depth cooking analytics from Klove Chef.
They are working on offering a white label solution for brands and celebrity chefs.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome Bahubali Shete and Mario Rodriguez!

Klove Chef

Klove Chef is a conversational solution which takes consumers through meal planning, recipe discovery, buying ingredients and cooking with the support of a conversational assistant.
Focusing on becoming the primary interface for consumers in the kitchen.
Includes a chat bot feature.
Facilitates an easier cooking experience for home cooks by giving them chef tips, hacks and tricks.
It is available in Canada! Yeah!

A startup in the Voice Tech space: The challenges and successes

There’s great difficulty in trying to come up with languages and terminology that fits users in different countries (with diverse cultures).
It takes much longer for people like potential investors and early adopters to understand a Voice Technology product/solution.
Klove Chef is consistently getting 5-Star reviews because early adopters love it, once they try it out.
Kove Chef is building up their recipe database.
They recently participated at the Smart Kitchen Summit; the “Sears of Food Technology.”
Klove Chef is the only Voice First cooking solution in the Food Tech space. It has created numerous partnership opportunities.
A New feature, RecipeBox, enables users to add their own recipes through either voice or chat bots. They can then convert them into speakable recipes on Alexa and Google Home. They are currently accepting beta signups for RecipeBox.
Klove Chef is building a community of people who interact with Klove Chef on a daily basis while sharing their home recipes with each other.
A one-stop shop for culinary questions: Klove Chef plans to offer a Q&A solution for users.
Forging partnerships with companies that will add other elements of functionality to Klove Chef is another goal.
The partners are helping diversify the types of recipes, and develop compatibilities with certain devices and appliances that have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth functionality.
The Mealkits partnership: Klove Chef helps Mealkits consumers with any problems they have during the cooking process, while also enabling them to provide feedback on the experience. Mealkit companies are able to get unmatched in-depth cooking analytics from Klove Chef.
They are working on offering a white label solution for brands and celebrity chefs.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Alexa in Education with Aparna and Deepak Ramanathan

In this episode, Teri welcomes Deepak and Dr. Aparna Ramanathan, co-founders of Ask My Class. Ask My Class is a company that produces Alexa skills for education, and helps teachers, parents and kids thrive through the use of Amazon Echos in the classroom. If you have an interest in education and voice-first technology, this episode is for you!

Dr. Aparna Ramanathan is a critical care medical doctor from Australia. When she moved to the United States, she changed her focus to child health and well being. She saw voice technology as a way to help with emotional regulation in children at home and in the classroom.

Deepak Ramanathan is in engineering, and has had product and marketing roles at Google. He has also spent time on education teams within Google.

Key points from Aparna and Deepak Ramanathan about Education and Voice-First Tech

Aparna likes that there is a way for children to use technology that is screen-free.
Voice is a very natural form of interaction for children.

Ask My Class

Ask My Class is an Alexa skill that provides teachers on-tap, easily accessible prompts and activities wherever they are in the classroom.
It is available in Canada!
Teachers view the Amazon Echo device as an extra set of hands in the classroom.
The Ask My Class skill is a communal experience that students can share.
The skill was piloted last year in elementary classrooms. This year there is a pilot focusing on early learning.
There are an estimated 10000-15000 Echos in classrooms currently.
Echos are introduced by teachers to their classes similar to the way iPads or computers are introduced, with specific rules and policies about how students are allowed to use the devices.
Some activities help students to learn emotional regulation techniques.
There has been good feedback from teachers that Alexa helps to develop teamwork and social skills.
The Alexa skill can be customized with class lists, morning briefings, quizzes, and other features.
A web application can be used by the teacher that can setup the skill to his/her liking. This can also be shared with other teachers/classes.
Ask My Class helps teachers to build engaging, exciting learning environments in the classroom in a way that is easy, accessible and communal.
Future plans are to add scheduling features and to further develop the abilities to share features with other teachers.
Amazon Echo devices are ideally placed to help with learning languages in the classroom; there are plans to include this in the future as well.
Education and voice technology is a very exciting space.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Ask My Class Website
My Class Alexa Skill
AskMyClass on Twitter
[email protected]
Teri Fisher on Twitter
Alexa in Canada on Twitter
Alexa in Canada on Instagram
Please leave a review on iTunes
Shopping on Amazon.ca
The Alexa Conference, presented by VoiceFirst.FM
use promo code ALEXAINCANADA for 20% off

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Halloween Skills with Einat Laudon from Chatty Creations

In this episode, Teri welcomes Einat Laudon, a biochemist turned Alexa skills creator. Einat went from having no computer programming skills to creating three fantastic skills, one of which is related to education and teaching evolution concepts out of a school curriculum. She has also created two skills specifically geared towards the Halloween holiday. She has a Masters in Biochemistry and worked a few years in a scientific technology company designing lesson plans. She developed an interest in creating apps and later discovered voice technology which led her to start creating her own Alexa skills.

Both of her Halloween skills are available in Canada but the evolution education one is only available in the United States because of the way Amazon classifies their skills in Canada and getting approval in Canada for that.

Kiwi Monsters

Her first skill is called Kiwi Monsters.
Learned how to design skills on storyline. The flow charts in storyline reminded her of an evolution tree which gave her the idea to develop a decision tree where users could decide what would happen to the monsters. Essentially, users can explore the evolutionary tree of the monsters.
Kiwi Monsters is a choose your own adventure type of story with kids making choices as they go along, while also learning scientific principles based on evolution.

First Halloween skill

She first thought of scary Halloween sounds and made a skill based on that. She combined different sounds to create nice music with all kinds of scary sounds in the background.

Second Halloween skill

Thought about an interactive Halloween skill where Alexa would greet and entertain trick-or-treaters when they go to people’s houses. She likes using human voices and used her 86 year old neighbor’s voice to create the witch’s voice.
The story: When a trick-or-treater arrives to a house they open the skill and they talk to a witch. They get to choose which kind of scary noises they want to make with Alexa to scare and trick the witch.

The sound effects

She applied her creativity in combining different sound effects that she got online to create the story in a way that would give users an immersive experience.

Future skills

She plans to create more skills based on science, education and games.
She’s working with other designers to create sound effects for their skills to create more immersive experiences for users. She enjoys it.