Pestle app can now save recipes from Reels using on-device AI

Recipe app and cooking assistant Pestle is turning to AI to make it easier to save recipes from social media — and it’s not using OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to do it. Instead, Pestle’s latest addition lets you import recipes directly from Instagram Reels using on-device machine learning to quickly process the recipe and save it to your collection.

The result is a feature that can save recipes found while scrolling through Reels “almost instantly,” says Will Bishop, creator of Pestle.

First launched in 2022, Bishop created Pestle to solve the common problem of finding recipes on the web. Unfortunately, today’s recipe pages are littered with ads and long stories, with the recipe itself sitting at the bottom of the page. Bishop said he would copy recipes from the web into Apple’s Notes app, where he would add his own tweaks and tips. But the system was disorganized because Notes was never designed to be a recipe database.

That led Bishop to create an app called Pestle, which lets you save recipes from the web by tapping the “Share” button in your iOS browser and then choosing an app as your destination. In addition to importing and organizing recipes, the app also helps you plan meals, create shopping lists, stay up to date with new recipes from creators, navigate with voice commands, and even cook hands-free or with friends and family remotely using Apple’s SharePlay feature for FaceTime.

Bishop says that while saving recipes from the web solved one problem, app users had long been asking for the ability to save recipes from Instagram as well.

“I always rejected the idea because there were a million different ways to write recipes—literally—and the idea of ​​parsing everything seemed like a monumental task,” he says. “I’ve seen other recipe apps that have taken on this challenge, but all they seem to do is call ChatGPT and make the user wait sometimes up to a minute for a response.”

The developer says it didn’t want to integrate with ChatGPT for several reasons, including processing time and concerns about OpenAI’s relationship with privacy. Additionally, it says, offloading parsing to a third party could mean Pestle could be subject to downtime and there would be no way to improve its response until a third party like OpenAI releases a faster or more accurate model.

So Bishop began exploring the idea of ​​using machine learning on the device. By managing the process on the device, it could happen much faster, and he would still have control over it.

“The slowest part of the operation is the actual request to download the captions to Reel; the processing itself takes about a tenth of a second,” he says.

To take advantage of the new feature, you can share an Instagram Reel using Pestle, much like you would save recipes from the web. The app also supports importing any recipe in plain text, Bishop notes.

The updated version of Pestle is available as a free download on the iOS App Store. Subscribers get access to more features, such as access to the discovery section for cooking inspiration, 14 days of meal planning support, shopping lists with Apple Reminders integration, and more.