Cookpad, the global recipe hosting site, today revealed OiCy, a new service that connects recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking system for smart kitchens.
OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand.
So if you were trying to make a particular Cookpad spaghetti recipe, OiCy would pull data from the recipe, and “talk” to different connected appliances you might have in your kitchen and guide you each step of the way. Depending on the number and type of appliances you’d have, it would automatically boil your water, tell you when to add/remove pasta, dispense seasonings, etc..
But that type of full connected kitchen implementation is still a ways off. Right now, OiCy only works with a limited set of select recipes in Japanese, and the company has only just begun talking with appliance manufacturers in Japan about implementing the software into future versions of devices that wouldn’t come out until sometime next year.
You can see how OiCy works in this video showing off a prototype Japanese condiment dispenser that talks with a Cookpad recipe to create sauces necessary for that dish.
At the heart of the digital kitchen is the recipe, and Cookpad has 4.3 million of them from 68 countries and across 23 different languages. So translating that content into a machine readable format will give them a solid base for creating a wide ranging, global guided cooking system.
Translating recipes into a machine readable format, however, is no small task. Cookpad recipes are user generated, so there is no standardization around the way they are written, so data is all over the proverbial place. Cookpad is starting with Japanese recipes and the Japan appliance market because 55 million of it 90 million active user base is in Japan.
While Cookpad has the recipes, it’s playing catch up when it comes to appliance manufacturer relationships. Rival recipe sites such as Innit and SideChef have already formed relationships to integrate their guided cooking software into appliances from LG and Electrolux.
As it happens, I’ll be on-stage, moderating a panel with Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Cookpad at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe conference tomorrow. So I’ll be sure to ask him about OiCy’s roll out and role within Cookpad.