KloveChef, the voice-guided cooking startup cofounded by one of India’s biggest celebrity chefs in Sanjeev Kapoor, is opening up its platform this month to publishers wanting to add voice-guided cooking functionality to their recipes.
The new tool will allow anyone who has recipe content — chefs, cookbook authors, bloggers or food retailers — to upload their recipes to KloveChef’s platform via a web interface and it will convert them into a voice-guided recipes.
“We will democratize the interactive recipe creation and distribution,” said Bahubali Shété, KloveChef cofounder and CEO, in an interview with The Spoon.
Shété told me that recipe publishers will be able to use KloveChef to publish their recipes across a variety of voice platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Home and Amazon Fire TV. To do so, they just copy the recipe URL or paste the full recipe into the web interface and KloveChef will convert into a voice-guided recipe.
Shété also said that publishers will have the option of letting users send their recipes posted on other web channels such as YouTube or Pinterest to their voice assistants for guided cooking.
KloveChef is opening up their voice platform after finding some success with their Alexa voice skill targeted primarily at home cooks in India. According to Shété, the guided cooking assistant has a total of 465,000 users and 100,000 monthly active users.
Shété says publishers can make money through KloveChef if the recipe is converted into a shopping list. The recipe-to-shopping list feature, which KloveChef has been testing through its app in India, currently has over 1 million recipes converted into shopping lists via voice search.
I have to admit, I like the idea of self-publishing recipes to voice platforms. It reminds me of the early days of ebooks, when authors would use technology from early pioneers like Smashwords to put their books into the world and on other popular platforms. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, just as like those early days of ebooks, recipe self-publishers are relying on Amazon to reach the end consumer, only instead of Kindle this time it’s Alexa.
It’s too soon to see how successful KloveChef will be in attracting cooks for its voice guided recipe assistant outside of India. In its home market, they’ve been able to leverage the large reach of Kapoor, while here in the states, Alexa tends to favor its featured partners such as Food Network or Tasty. KloveChef will have to compete with the algorithm-favored partners through attracting recipe publishers such as popular food bloggers or food retailers with built-in audiences to accrue a sizeable user base.
Looking forward, the company hopes to also attract users by making the platform better over time. One of the early features will be adapting guided cooking where users can speed up a recipe or slow it down depending on their experience. The company plans to release the new capabilities by mid-August.
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