Recipe app and cooking assistant Pestle is using AI to make it easier to save recipes from social media, but it doesn't use OpenAI's ChatGPT tech to do so. Instead, Pestle's latest feature uses on-device machine learning to import recipes directly from Instagram Reels, quickly processing the recipes and saving them to your collection.
The result is the ability to “almost instantly” save a recipe you come across while scrolling through Reels, says Pestle developer Will Bishop.
First released in 2022, Pestle was created by Bishop to solve a common problem: finding recipes on the web. Unfortunately, today's recipe sites are cluttered with ads and long articles, with the actual recipes at the bottom of the page. Bishop would copy recipes from the web into Apple's Notes app, where he would add his own tweaks and tips. But Notes was never designed as a recipe database, so the system was disorganized.
This led Bishop to develop an app called Pestle, which allows users to save recipes from the web by simply tapping the “Share” button from the iOS browser and selecting the app as the destination. In addition to importing and organizing recipes, the app also lets users plan meals, create shopping lists, check out new recipes from creators, navigate with voice commands, and even cook hands-free and with friends and family far away using Apple's FaceTime SharePlay feature.
While saving recipes from the web solved one pain point, Bishop said app users had long been clamoring for a way to save from Instagram as well.
“I was always against the idea because there are literally millions of ways to write a recipe, and parsing it all seemed like a monumental task,” he says. “I'd seen other recipe apps tackle this challenge, but they all seemed to just call ChatGPT and make the user wait a minute or so to get a response.”
The developers say they did not want to integrate with ChatGPT for several reasons, including concerns about processing time and OpenAI's ties to privacy. Additionally, they say offloading the analysis to a third party could mean Pestle would be subject to downtime and would leave them with no way to improve their responsiveness until a third party such as OpenAI released a faster or more accurate model.
So Bishop began exploring the idea of using on-device machine learning instead: managing the process on-device would be much faster and allow him to maintain control.
“The slowest part of the operation is just the request to get the captions for the reel; the process itself happens in about a tenth of a second,” he says.
To use the new feature, you share an Instagram Reel in Pestle just like you would save a recipe from the web, and Bishop points out that the app also supports importing plain-text recipes.
The updated version of Pestle is available to download for free from the iOS App Store. Subscribers can access even more features, including access to a Discover section for cooking inspiration, 14-day meal planning support, and shopping lists with Apple Reminders integration.