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Mozilla is developing a kitchen bot to answer the question, ‘What’s for dinner?’

By Harrison Kaminsky July 31, 2016

mozilla developing kitchen bot firefox donations — Image used with permission by copyright holder

We’ve seen Family Hub fridges, smart frying pans, and intelligent cookers — but a new effort from Mozilla might finally answer the ultimate connected-kitchen question: “What’s for dinner?”

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit behind the Firefox web browser, is developing a smart kitchen bot to help consumers figure out what to cook for their meals. The project, which is only in the validation stage, is briefly outlined on Mozilla’s wiki.

“Throughout this project, we are exploring what it would be like to know what is in your fridge all the time with little to no effort,” the wiki reads. “Then, after knowing the ingredients in your kitchen, being able to take those ingredients and suggest new and healthy recipes to try. To do this we are utilizing image recognition technology to scan food items and bar codes.”

The project launched in June, but it only recently became public after the Smart Kitchen Summit wrote about it this week.

“Smart Kitchen,” as Mozilla calls the initiative on its wiki, is part of the Mozilla connected devices project, and according to the Smart Kitchen Summit, could ultimately “result in a software system that utilizes sensor technology such as RFID or image recognition and artificial intelligence that accounts for dietary preferences, current kitchen food inventory and other factors to help a person coordinate and cook meals.”

While Mozilla is very early in the define and discovery phase of the project, it has set forth the following immediate goals to validate its assumption that people want recipes they can make with their existing kitchen inventory.

We believe that if we give a user an experimental device for identifying their inventory that we will be able to recognize 20% of items with our existing training to date.

If we run a Facebook Ad describing our product, we expect a 2% response rate

“If we create a video that shows our product vision and advertise it, we expect a 2% response rate.

Mozilla will also be testing the assumption that it “can use image recognition to accurately identify some percentage of the contents of the kitchen.” (Yep, they split that infinitive like the peas in your next soup.)

To follow along with Mozilla’s goals for the project as it progresses, you can follow its public Trello board with updating tasks.

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Harrison Kaminsky

Contributor

Harrison’s obsession in the tech space originated in his father’s electronics store in Denville, New Jersey, where he…

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