Amazon Echo’s Alexa has a taste for cooking

Could the winner of MasterChef in a few years’ time be a robot?

Could the winner of MasterChef Australia in a few years’ time be a robot? That odd thought flashed through my mind as I watched Amazon Echo’s personal assistant Alexa take command in a kitchen scenario, spouting out step-by-step instructions for a snow egg recipe.

It seems that artificial intelligence is about to invade the kitchen, with Echo in this case being primed to bring you 60,000 recipes in an Australian-developed app.

You interact with Alexa as you would the supervising cook in the kitchen, asking questions and being given steps one at a time. Alexa stops and waits for you to finish scrambling that egg, adding the icing sugar or chopping and sprinkling the chives before bothering you with the next step.

To start the application, you ask Alexa to “Open Taste”. From then onwards, the conversation is context-sensitive. You ask questions and respond to Alexa’s requests sometimes with simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, without having to address Alexa by name at every step.

The News DNA (Digital News Australia) unit developing the app is part of News Corp Australia, which publishes The Australian and two publications that are partnering with the development: taste.com.au and Delicious.

Senior product manager for The Food Group at News, Gemma Battenbough, said 60,000 recipes were being loaded into the app. The aim was to make it available to the public later this year.

Ms Battenbough said apps also were being built for iOS and Android that would bring the same capability to smartphones. In these cases, the recipes would be delivered by the standard voices for those phones: Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant.

Platform manager at News DNA David Berry demonstrated the application with Alexa first giving instructions on what to ask. For example you could ask her to find recipes that include eggs and spinach — two ingredients you may have on hand in the kitchen.

After selecting from available options, you tell Alexa to read the ingredients or start cooking. Mr Berry said the app was being designed to save a user’s progress through the recipe.

Today’s presentation in Sydney was part of News Corporation’s global ‘Alexa Jam’ being held in New York this week.

Amazon Echo nowadays supports more than 1000 third-party applications and thousands more are likely with interest in AI personal assistants gathering momentum.

The strengths and weakness of Echo, and its main rival personal assistant Google Home, tend to reflect their histories. Having been in market longer, Echo is especially versatile as it hooks up with more third-party applications. Google Home is newer in market.

However Google Home seems to be better at understanding and processing everyday speech, which reflects the investment Google has made into developing natural language capability.

And in Australia, Home is more savvy when it comes to finding you local restaurants and directions, as it integrates with those capabilities in Android. But all this could be turned on its head over time.