You’ll soon be able to see recipe suggestions on your iPhones just by using a picture as a reference. This capability is expected to arrive in the Visual Look Up of iOS 17.
The new capability wasn’t given its dedicated moment during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, but the company is teasing it on its iOS 17 page. And just by looking at it, the way it works seems pretty simple.
The feature will be included in Apple’s Visual Look Up. And based on the image shared by Apple, iPhone users will be able to summon the function by tapping on the information icon on the screen of the food’s picture. By doing so, the Visual Look Up should identify the main subjects in the photo (in this case, the food) and will later suggest a list of recipe results. However, as it appears on Apple’s page, it seems Visual Look Up won’t directly suggest the exact recipe for the dish in the photo. Instead, it will recommend similar recipes using the main ingredient identified by the system.
On the other hand, the recipe suggestions will include links to the sites containing the information for the dishes. This is somewhat bad news for Google as it means the feature will bypass Google Search and might discourage users from visiting its search engine to look for recipes manually. Also, having the links launch via Safari by default will further sway iPhone users away from using Google Chrome.
Apple is not the first to try this capability. Prior to the announcement of this new function in Visual Look Up, Snap unveiled a new feature in its My AI chatbot called “My AI Snaps.” According to the company, its Snapchat+ subscribers can send the chatbot a snap of different images, and the bot will reply using pictures, too. This could include photos of food. Snap made a promising remark during the introduction of the feature, saying you can send the bot your “latest grocery haul,” and it “might recommend a recipe.” Apple’s move to bring it to its Visual Look Up, nonetheless, is more attractive as it directly targets iPhone users, and it will remove the need to launch a separate third-party app to look for recipes.
