Chatbots in the Kitchen

by RogerJanuary 26, 2023

Cartoon image of two robots in a futuristic kitchen. — This image was created using Midjourney and is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0

On today’s show we have a very special guest who joins us for a conversation about artificial intelligence chatbots in the kitchen. World-famous chatbot ChatGPT is here (sort of) to share how home cooks can use chatbots to help meal plan, find ingredient substitutions, learn about food history, generate recipes on the fly, and so much more. Oh, it’s also pretty good at telling jokes too!

Mentioned in this Episode

There is a whole exciting world of artificial intelligence out there. A couple of tools I talked about on today’s episode include Midjourney, which is a tool that can generate images based on text prompts. For example, the show image for this episode found at the top of this post was generated in Midjourney using the prompt “chatbots in a kitchen sharing cooking tips.”

The bulk of this episode features ChatGPT, which is a Natural Language Processing AI chatbot that can essentially carry on conversations with a person. You can see how this works during the interview in the second half of the show. Keep in mind ChatGPT is a text-based chatbot; what you hear in the episode is the actual responses it gave me but put through a text-to-voice program so you could actually “hear” the responses.

While I don’t think all of the responses are perfect (I have some questions about some of the baking soda substitution ideas and the risotto recipe), but I love the potential for helping cooks be more creative, helping with meal planning, and generally just giving you another tool to use in your cooking journey. Besides, when you talk to a real person, their answers are rarely perfect either!

Here is a screenshot of a portion of my conversation with ChatGPT, so you can see what the interaction looks like.

OpenAI is the company that developed ChatGPT (and is also the developer of another popular AI image generator, DALL-E 2).

Have you used an AI Chatbot, or other artificial intelligence tool, to help you with a food or cooking related task or question? If so, I would love to hear from you! Send me an email and let me know how it went!