Your New Sous Chef is AI 🧑‍🍳 🤖 : Get Creative with Google's Food Mood 🍜

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear Nanobiters,

It's Thursday, and you know what that means – time for our weekly AI tool spotlight!

As promised, we are here with another cool discovery from the Google Labs kitty. This week, we're diving into Food Mood from the Google Arts & Culture category.

We've all used the internet to search for recipes – and we've all turned to the internet for advice as life throws new challenges at us. But what if, with the magic of Generative AI, we could combine these superpowers?

Think of it as a personal chef who listens to your day, your feelings, your thoughts... and then whips up a completely new, inventive dish with unique ingredients just for your mood.

Curious how it works? Read on, Nanobiters!

THE STORY BEHIND FOOD MOOD

Food Mood isn't your average recipe finder. This experimental AI tool, invented by Google Arts & Culture, takes a playful approach to culinary inspiration. It acts as a "Food Therapist" of sorts, asking you how you feel or how you'd like to feel, and then conjuring up fusion recipes tailored to your mood.

If you find yourself in a cooking rut, Food Mood could be just what you need to spark your culinary creativity. This innovative platform combines the flavors of two distinct cuisines to generate a fusion recipe tailored to your preferences.

Whether you're craving a starter, soup, main course, or dessert, Food Mood can whip up a unique dish that blends the unexpected. Imagine the exotic fusion of Sri Lankan and Ugandan flavors, or a surprising combination of Omani and Belgian influences.

But Food Mood's potential goes beyond the kitchen. It hints at a future where AI can understand our emotions and offer personalized recommendations for everything from music to travel destinations. It's a testament to the power of AI to combine familiar elements in unexpected ways, sparking creativity and delight.

This intriguing experiment was brought to life by artists Emmanuel Durgoni and Gaël Hugo, utilizing Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.

HOW FOOD MOOD WORKS?

Food Mood keeps things simple. It presents you with a user-friendly interface where you select the type of dish you're craving (starter, soup, main course, or dessert), the number of servings, and, most importantly, two different cuisines you'd like to combine.

What I love about this tool is the user-friendly interface. You can choose the number of servings by clicking the - & + buttons.

Next, you can choose the cuisine you want to try — I wanted to try a combination of Indian and Spanish cuisine.

You could also customize your recipe further with dietary options, like:

This is what the final recipe looks like:

TECH BEHIND FOODMOOD

Behind the scenes, Google's PaLM API (Pathways Language Model) works its magic. This powerful AI model has been trained on a massive dataset of text and code, enabling it to understand language and generate creative responses. In the case of Food Mood, the AI takes your inputs and uses them to concoct a unique recipe that fuses the chosen cuisines.

To achieve this, the PaLM API goes through multiple steps:

1. Creative Generation: The AI, first generates a creative recipe idea based on your inputs, using a "high temperature" setting to encourage more imaginative and unexpected results.

2. Formatting: The response is then structured into a specific format, including the recipe name, ingredients list, instructions, and a description of the dish. This step uses a "low temperature" setting to ensure accuracy and consistency.

3. Safeguarding: To avoid any offensive or inappropriate suggestions, the AI checks the recipe name and adjusts it if necessary.

4. Final Formatting: The recipe is then finalized into a polished JSON format, ready to be displayed to you.

This multi-step process allows Food Mood to balance creativity with structure, ensuring that the recipes it generates are both exciting and practical.

Additionally, the AI can tap into external data sources, such as shopping APIs, to help you find the ingredients you need and even purchase them directly through the interface.

The result? A culinary adventure you never knew you needed!

NANOBITS FOOD EXPERIMENTS

After experimenting with the tool, I had mixed thoughts.

The final recipe was simply underwhelming — it lacked the depth and detail I expected. The fusion of Indian and Spanish cuisine wasn't clearly explained, leaving me curious about the specific influences. The recipe also felt a bit disconnected, missing the kind of narrative or background that often accompanies dishes in cookbooks. Additionally, the AI-generated image of the recipe didn't quite capture the visual appeal.

So, I went ahead and tried an alternative called cookAIfood.com.

The sign-up process was tedious — it took forever to finally sign up and use my free credits to create a recipe.

But, they have a lot more options than Food Mood — more dietary options, more ingredients, and more types of dishes. While you can’t mash two cuisines, like Food Mood, you can create a whole menu using cookAIfood.

Sticking with my preference for rice-based main courses, I opted for a Spanish culinary adventure. Intrigued to see if my choices would influence the outcome, I kept my selection as close as possible to my previous experiment. Here are the results:

What I loved about the result was the ability to discover nearby restaurants serving similar dishes, providing a real-world connection to my culinary exploration.

The inclusion of related recipes also sparked my interest, suggesting further avenues for experimentation. Additionally, I appreciated the clear information on the nutritional value of a single serving, allowing me to make informed choices about my meal.

LAST THOUGHTS

Food Mood can shake you out of your cooking routine and inspire you to try new flavor combinations you might never have considered.

By blending diverse culinary traditions, it opens up a world of possibilities in your kitchen. It's a playground for creativity, encouraging you to experiment with ingredients and techniques from different corners of the globe. Whether you're a seasoned chef or a kitchen novice, Food Mood can be your muse, sparking inspiration and transforming your meals into exciting experiences.

For those who love to cook but often find themselves lacking inspiration or time for extensive recipe research, Food Mood offers a quick and easy solution. With just a few clicks, you can unlock a treasure trove of unique and delicious recipes that cater to your specific cravings and moods.

Swiggy, the popular Indian online food ordering and delivery platform, is already envisioning the exciting possibilities that AI experiments like Food Mood could unlock.

It’s a free tool and can be accessed on both laptops and mobile phones. So, go ahead and give it a whirl!

Let me know in the comments or in the mail some interesting recipes that you tried using this tool.

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Click here to browse more AI jobs in India and outside

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