Snapchat now helps you be a Masterchef
If you are not very creative in the kitchen or there are just days when inspiration does not come to you, Snapchat may have a simple tool to help you. Not sure what to eat today? No problem. Open Snapchat on your smartphone and go to the “Scan” tab. This mode has been vitaminized in the latest version, and is now capable of recognize foods and show you recipes that you can do with the ingredients that you have in your kitchen.
To give this feature the quality it deserves, Snapchat has collaborated with allrecipes.com, one of the largest recipe databases on the Internet. The Snapchat app AI can recognize a total of 1,200 different articles so far, and has indexed more than 4,500 recipes by Allrecipes.
In addition, for each scan that we carry out, we can go directly to the page of Product Wikipedia, thus being able to find much more information about it. It will be very useful if we are looking for information about the properties of a food, its origin or its nutritional properties. Still, this feature is slightly redundant, as within Scan, Snapchat has a long-standing feature specifically for just this. Use the platform’s database Yuka and it allows us to scan the barcode of a product to show us all its information regarding calories, sugars, fats and other nutritional values.
Interesting, but with plenty of room for improvement
This new Snapchat food recognition and recipe suggestion feature is cool, but it’s still pretty green. There are important limitations, such as not being able to recognize packaged foods yet. We will have similar problems with ground or powdered products. Sometimes, we will have to make it a bit easy for the AI, looking for the correct angle and lighting before taking the photo if we want it to recognize the food well, since obviously the application is not infallible and needs many clues to differentiate a cherry tomato from a cherry, for example. But, in any case, when the program correctly detects the food, it is able to show us a relevant recipe, which, after all, is the most important part of this function.
Food recognition and recipe suggestions toI just got to Snapchat in the United States, so it shouldn’t be long until we can enjoy this feature in Europe. These new functions will be added to those that we already had previously, such as the recognition of dog breeds, detection of car models, identification of plants and search for articles of clothing from the application scanner.
