While there is quite the range of guided cooking assistants for home cooks, Cooksy is looking to deliver guided cooking by adding a device above your home’s range. Launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo, Cooksy is a small camera and thermal sensor that you affix above your cooktop. As Cooksy’s cameras and sensors monitor the temperatures of your pan and food, it talks with an accompanying mobile app, alerting you if your pan is too hot or too cold, when to flip foods and when to remove them.
Cooksy has a level of intelligence, so it can identify some foods the user places in a pan, like salmon, for instance. The device also comes pre-loaded with some recipes. But as Cooksy President, Jeff Knighton, explained to me by video chat this week, Cooksy is mostly about user-generated content. Yes, Cooksy can identify salmon in the pan, but if you’re not following a specific recipe from the app, it won’t provide specific guidance.
What it will do is provide data around the user’s experience cooking that food — the aforementioned salmon, for instance. That data might include how hot the pan is, when the salmon gets flipped, and when it gets removed from the heat. Cooksy saves all that information so that the user can bring it back up once they cook salmon again. Cooksy will ensure the pan is at the same temperature as before and that the user flips the salmon and removes it from the heat at the same times they did before.
Cooksy’s goal is to have users share their cooking experiences with a larger community. In addition to recording your cook, the system has basic editing tools that allow you to chop the video down to just its essentials and easily input ingredient and other recipe information. This means that if a professional chef cooks a steak and uploads their video doing so, users could replicate the same cooking process at home.
Of course, that also requires people to do the work of creating recipes and uploading them to the app. Which may or may not be a big deal, depending on how user-friendly the Cooksy app is.
Cooksy is coming to market just one week after Miso Robotics launched a similar cameras+tablet solution for professional kitchens. Miso’s artificial intelligence capabilities seem more robust, with the ability to recognize foods and automatically tell when they are done cooking (no recipe required), but Cooksy could theoretically help home cooks make sauces, stir frys, basically any dish you cook on the stove.
Cooksy, however, won’t come cheap. Early birds backing the project on Indiegogo can pledge $389 for a standard Cooksy, or $479 for the Cooksy Pro, which features greater thermal resolution and more on-board storage. If you are at all interested, you may not want to wait, because the retail price is 40 percent more ($649 for the basic and $799 for the Pro). That is not cheap. Especially if you consider you can pick up an entire six-piece set of Hestan Smart Cookware or a June Oven for $600. And you don’t have to wait. Cooksy is supposed to ship in November of this year, though as avid readers of The Spoon know, crowdfunded hardware campaigns have a tendency to miss their deadlines.
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