Snapchat’s Scan mode is now much smarter than before. In the latest update, the application is able to recognize food through the camera of our smartphone and show us ideas for cooking. He forgot about wasting time in the kitchen turning the coconut to end up having dinner as usual.
Snapchat now helps you be a Masterchef
If you are not very creative in the kitchen or there are just days that 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 recognizing foods and showing you recipes that you can make with the ingredients 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’s AI can recognize a total of 1,200 different items so far, and has indexed more than 4,500 Allrecipes recipes.
In addition, by each scan we carry out, we can go directly to the Wikipedia page of the product , 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 had a long-standing feature specifically for this very purpose. It uses the database of the Yuka platform and allows us to scan the barcode of a product to show us all its information related to 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 significant 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 are just about to hit Snapchat in the United States , so it shouldn’t be long until we get to 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.
