Samsung’s new app uses AI to choose meals for you

Samsung has dropped an AI-powered food and recipe app called Samsung Food that will suggest meal plans, synch with Samsung Health, and control connected cooking equipment in the kitchen.

Samsung Food is loaded with 160,000 recipes and is pitched as a personalised assistant that helps users discover new things to cook, create tailored meal plans, order ingredients online, and control smart cooking appliances.

The AI bit seems to be a product of Whisk, a smart food platform which Samsung acquired in 2019 which uses ‘Food AI’, to suggests meals based on user preferences and food seasonality. Once a tailored suggestion has been made, the ingredients can then be added to a shopping list then converted straight into an online order from the app.

The motivation for sending an AI infused recipe app into the world seems to be about promoting Samsung’s connected kitchen appliances. Users will be able to set timers, preheat ovens and send recipes’ cook settings to its ‘Bespoke Oven’ product, and Samsung plans to connect ‘Bespoke induction ranges’ and ‘Bespoke microwaves’ to Samsung Food by the end of the year.

Indeed, as the press release states: ‘Samsung Food strives to further extend the ease that is possible with a smart, connected kitchen of Samsung home appliances and will continue to be updated with new features following its official launch.’

By the end of the year, the Samsung Health app will be integrated with it so that users will be able to receive, perhaps unwelcome, suggestions for diet management based on BMI, body composition and calorie consumption.

And next year the integration of Vision AI technology will allow the app to recognize food items and meals photographed through the camera and provide details about them, such as nutrition information or recommended recipes.

Give it another few years and Samsung will chew the food for you as well.

“The food we enjoy and the way we prepare it are central to our daily lives, and we all love to cook and eat together,” said Chanwoo Park, Executive Vice President and Head of the Service Biz Group of the Digital Appliances Business at Samsung Electronics. “By connecting digital appliances and mobile devices across the Samsung ecosystem and assisting users from shopping list to dinner plate, Samsung Food is using advanced AI capabilities to deliver a highly personalized, all-in-one food experience that users can control straight from their palms.”

As stated the play seems to be about creating some sort of hub for Samsung’s line of smart cookers and the like, presumably so filling a kitchen with such devices might seem more desirable/plausible to foodies with a lot of money to burn when it gets around to plugging them all together later this year.

Connected devices of varying levels of credulity have been making a spectacle of themselves at trade shows like CES for years. But the market for such pricy gear – such as this fridge from LG which can start flashing its panels in 190,000 colour combinations in synch with music for you – surely remains modest.

In the meantime, the prospect of leveraging AI to throw up some tailored meal suggestions may well find some traction with the gym-inclined or people otherwise set upon meticulously documenting what they plan to wolf down in the week – though there would appear to be a deep well of potential irritation if, for example, it starts nagging you when you reach for the donuts.

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