Here’s your cocktail, shaken and stirred with AI

The picture that wasn’t. Photo credit: Daspunkt

Ok, the picture of a pale yellow drink in a martini glass with a blue stem, set on a grey-brown table, might not have been impressive. But the name was still lovely: Iced Teani. And it had two of the world’s favorite liquids – tea and vodka.

So I went ahead.

The preparation took longer than the 2 minutes mentioned (I will tell you why later), but the drink came out tangy and lemony, with just the right bite of vodka to make the sun go down on a sultry summer evening.

It was straight out of Recipe Book, possibly the only Indian cooking app to make it to the Editors’ Choice section on Google Play. The Iced Teani is not an original recipe, and the app doesn’t claim so either.

But here’s the novelty: its recipes are guided by artificial intelligence (AI).

The app is downloaded by more than 440,000 people every month and features approximately 475,000 recipes from across the globe. A Google team from Mountain View even turned up at the team’s headquarters in the southern Indian city of Kochi to shoot a video.

A sizzle in the crowded kitchen

The Recipe Book team

How is this app sizzling in a crowded space, dominated by American and Japanese competitors like Epicurious, Yummly, Cookpad, and The Frying Pan?

Founders Anoop Balakrishnan, Nikhil Dharman, and Arun Ravi – all engineers from the same batch – say Google liked the way they employed AI in a small use case. “Usually this kind of technology is used for complicated applications like self-driving cars and robotics,” says Anoop.

They spent a good deal of time training the AI engine to discern between food ingredients. Anoop claims that 80 percent of their work went into developing the Snap n Make feature, which lets foodies take photos of the ingredients they want to cook with, while another feature, Shake n Make, fetches recipes when you tap on the ingredients that have been fed into the app.

Recipe Book debuted on the Google Play store in February 2015 but only gained traction after the launch of these two features eight months later.

Sweet and sour