Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home
  3. News

This smart display alternative can now use AI to plan all your meals

Add as a preferred source on Google
The Skylight Cal Max installed on a wall.
Skylight

Skylight is a smart home company that produces a variety of smart display alternatives, such as the Skylight Cal Max. These serve as a central hub for all your daily planning — they’re primarily used as a digital calendar, but you can also use them to track chores, make lists, or meal prep. That last aspect just became much more exciting, as Skylight is officially introducing Sidekick, an AI-powered assistant that can plan all your meals in just a few minutes.

Sidekick is a new AI feature for Skylight devices. It’s capable of generating personalized recipes based on your budget, family size, and dietary restrictions, and it’ll even create a shopping list and load up step-by-step cooking instructions. Skylight hopes the new feature will save families 10 hours every month, as they’ll no longer need to worry about the logistics surrounding meal prep.

The new Sidekick menu on the Skylight app.
Skylight

Here’s how it works: After launching the Skylight app on your phone, you’ll now see a Sidekick button. Inside this menu is a Plan Meals button. Selecting this allows you to select which days of the week you’d like to generate recipes for, select how many people you’re cooking for, and choose to use only recipes you’ve already cooked or allow Sidekick to generate new recipes. You can also have Sidekick add all the related ingredients to your Grocery List.

Recommended Videos

The best part, however, is the Notes section. This is where you can type out any restrictions for the AI assistant to follow, such as budget restraints or cooking time limits. For example, I asked Sidekick to “create vegetarian dishes that take less than 30 minutes to prep,” and it offered me a Vegetable Stir-Fry with Tofu and a Caprese Pasta Salad. Along with populating these into my calendar, it provided a list of ingredients and cooking instructions.

Sidekick does more than just create meal plans. It can also import events to your calendar from PDFs or photos, import a recipe from cookbooks or websites, and create lists from photos or screenshots. Skylight notes that Sidekick is currently in beta, and it’s only available to Skylight Plus members. It’s already shaping up to be a great new feature for Skylight devices, and it’ll be exciting to see how it changes during this beta phase.

Jon Bitner
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jon Bitner is a writer covering consumer electronics, technology, and gaming. His work has been published on various websites…
Amazon refreshes Blink lineup with first 4K, pan-tilt, and battery-powered spotlight cameras
Amazon Blink Cameras 2026 lineup

Amazon has just launched five new products as part of its Blink security camera lineup, expanding their resolution, adding a spotlight, and jazzing up their hardware format. The Blink Mini 4K+, priced at $79.99, is the company's first 4K security camera that now goes all the way up to 4K video capture quality and offers a 115-degree horizontal field of view.

Blink Mini 4K+

Read more
Apple is already planning a bigger, 360-degree rotating HomeView
The upgraded model could pair a 9-inch display with a robotic arm that turns toward whoever is speaking.
Apple HomeView feature

Apple’s first HomeView hasn't reached customers yet, but the company is reportedly working on a more ambitious version. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is developing a higher-end model with a roughly 9-inch display mounted on a robotic arm that can rotate a full 360 degrees.

The current $299 HomeView is still on preorder, with deliveries beginning November 13. It uses a fixed 7-inch display on a speaker base, and Apple also sells a wall-mounted version.

Read more
Apple HomeView: Everything you need to know about Apple’s new smart home brain
Apple HomeView is more than an iPad for your wall. Here's everything it does
Apple HomeView feature

During the Welcome Home event, Apple announced a bunch of products that expand its smart home lineup. These share a connected ecosystem around the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The idea was to bring its tight integration into the living room, kitchen, and practically every other corner of your house.

Among these new gadgets was the Apple HomeView, the company's long-awaited smart home display, unveiled during its October 13 Welcome Home event. It combines a 7-inch touchscreen, built-in speakers, Apple's new conversational Siri AI, and a centralized dashboard for managing everything from security cameras to smart lighting.

Read more