I’m a stickler for not wasting food. So, every piece of vegetable, final spoonful of yogurt, or stray cubes of cheese has to find its way into a recipe. Most of the time, things turn out pretty well. But occasionally, a dish is marred because one ingredient just didn’t belong. That’s when my confidence dips, and I find myself scrolling through YouTube, searching for a recipe that’ll make use of what I’ve got at home.
Of course, when the refrigerator is packed with ingredients, you can turn any page in the cookbook or scroll through a reel on Instagram and make an exact delicacy. But the kitchen is a place of uncertainties where improvisation is important because of constraints that can come up during your meal prep at any time. So, what do you do when you don’t know what to make from the ingredients you have? If you had the Kitchen Cosmo, you could just place all the ingredients you had in front of it, and it would print you the ideal recipe you can make. An ideal kitchen gadget for improvisation, you say. Yes, but you can’t own it.
Designers: Ayah Mahmoud and C Jacob Payne
When the established industry names and the innovative startups are focused on creating AI-based kitchen technologies with high-definition displays and voice controls to automate tasking and optimize our efficiency in the kitchen; the Kitchen Cosmo, built at MIT, looks at the past for its inspiration, while integrating AI to make inconsistency in cooking its printable motive.
To that accord, Kitchen Cosmo, in its deep red body is an AI-powered cooking device, which generates recipes from ingredients you place in front of it. It draws its inspiration from the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, which promised to bring computing to the domestic sphere, but never really kicked off. The Cosmo, brainchild of designers C Jacob Payne and Ayah Mahmoud (developed in the MIT course ‘Interaction Intelligence,’) looks to be on the right path, since it intends to solve the everyday kitchen dilemma of “what should I cook” into a simple task, without the hanky-panky display or voice. The interface of the device is retro futuristic with knobs and sliders – all tactile controls onboard.
So, place the items you have on the platter in front of the Cosmo, tune it to your preference using the six analog inputs: mood, time, dietary needs, and more, and Cosmo prints you the possible, personalized recipe right there and then. To make this possible, Cosmo uses GPT-4o, capable of processing both images and text in real time. For the processing, a webcam acts as its eyes to identify the ingredients, while a “single API call” translates this into a recipe, which is then printed by the built-in thermal printer.
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