This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend
Every family has a loved one—a Nonno, Abuela, or aunt—whose cooking is magical, yet they never write down a single recipe. When asked, they send a rambling voice memo: "a splash of olive oil, reduce whole milk slow, brown until it smells like home."
I built KitchenTales for Nonno Giuseppe, Abuela Carmen, Auntie Priya, and Elena to capture and preserve their spoken culinary soul before it's lost to time.
KitchenTales turns casual audio voice memos into structured heirloom recipe cards using open-weight AI:
Turn messy spoken voice memos from loved ones into treasured heirloom recipes.
Built with ❤️ for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend
Every family has a friend, grandmother, or uncle whose cooking is pure magic—yet they never write down a single recipe.
Whenever you ask how to recreate their signature ragù, focaccia, dal, or birria, they send an unmeasured, rambling voice memo:
"Listen kiddo, brown your chuck roast slow until it crusts, throw in whatever carrots and onions you have, grate a little nutmeg, and add a splash of milk before the wine... that's the secret nobody tells you."
Handwritten notes get grease-stained and lost. Generic recipe blogs lack the intimate family tricks. KitchenTales was built to preserve these irreplaceable audio memories forever.
Drop in an unmeasured voice memo, and open-weight Google Gemma AI listens, extracts precise quantities…
Built with pure vanilla web standards (zero bundlers, instant load):
index.html & css/styles.css — 3D tactile buttons, glassmorphic depth, and warm culinary typography (Fraunces & Outfit). js/gemma-engine.js — Client-side Google Gemma 2 processing harness for transcript extraction and dietary conversions.js/voice-narrator.js — ElevenLabs neural TTS + Web Speech continuous hands-free voice command listener.js/recipes-data.js & js/app.js — Preloaded generational voice memos and private local vault storage.
Spoken Voice Memo ──▶ Google Gemma 2 AI ──▶ Heirloom Card ──▶ ElevenLabs Voice Guide
("brown slow, splash") (Entities & Secrets) (Dual Units) (Hands-free commands)
SpeechRecognition listener detects spoken triggers (
This project was pair-programmed with an autonomous coding agent:
Preserving culinary heritage, one spoken memory at a time.
Built with ❤️ for Hacktoberfest 2026: Build for a Friend.