This story is part of our continuing coverage of CES 2020, including tech and gadgets from the showroom floor.
Imagine if, after a long day at work, your fridge could look to see what you’ve got in stock and then suggest a meal composed of those ingredients. That’s what Samsung has developed with a new personalized cooking experience feature for its fridges, shown off at CES.
The tech combines Samsung’s Whisk smart food platform with the ViewInside camera for its Samsung Family Hub refrigerator. Using A.I.-powered image recognition, the tech is able to understand the items you have in your fridge (including tracking expiration dates) and use these to recommend a curated list of recipe suggestions. These can be further customized to not only incorporate the ingredients you already have in your possession, but also according to specific food preferences.
Previous versions of the Family Hub refrigerator range let users remotely view the inside of their fridge on a mobile device via the inbuilt cameras.
“Whisk’s integration with Family Hub’s ViewInside is aimed at helping users creatively solve the problem of waste food,” a spokesperson for Samsung told Digital Trends. “The average person wastes 238 pounds of food annually, making up 21% of the food they buy. Whisk’s Food A.I. understands what’s in your fridge and recommends recipes to use those ingredients up before they go bad.”
That’s not all Whisk’s tech can do, either. Samsung has also created apps for iOS and Android, plus a Chrome web extension, which can help users better plan and shop for meals by turning saved recipes into collaborative shopping lists. Let’s say, for instance, that a working couple takes turns cooking dinner during the week for themselves and their kids. Both partners sign up to Whisk and have a shared shopping list. Both can add items to the list throughout the week. This could be either based on recipes, which can be pulled off the internet, or just by noticing that certain items are running out.
The Family Hub fridge, meanwhile, will automatically recognize leftover ingredients and show a list of recipe recommendations to cook with the leftover ingredients, which are expiring soonest. Smart, right?
Whisk’s Food A.I. is a massive collaboration between 100 food data experts, nutritionists, data scientists and software engineers around the world. If it works half as well as is promised, this could be something really interesting.
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