Take a ChatGPT-style know-it-all chatbot, force him to stay in the kitchen and only give food advice. You get ChefTouski, a virtual chef designed by two Val-d’Or partners.
The two co-founders, Dave Tremblay and Cathy Elliott Morneau, decided to join their skills and take advantage of the artificial intelligence tool designed by OpenAI, which is behind the chatbot ChatGPT. Mr. Tremblay has multiplied restaurant openings over the past decade, while Ms. Elliott Morneau’s experiences have focused more on multimedia, communications and management.
“We imagined a character and did our own coding to program a friendly chef who has the possibility of knowing all the recipes in the world, explains Mr. Tremblay on the phone. ChefTouski is limited to cooking, unlike ChatGPT, which can be asked to make a bomb. »
The main idea behind ChefTouski, as the name suggests, is to come up with recipes from whatever is left in the fridge. “There was a lot of waste in some of my restaurants, unfortunately,” admits Dave Tremblay.
“We had several intentions at the start,” says Cathy Elliott Morneau. We realized that with what was on the market, you had no more recipes as soon as you asked to include three or four ingredients. Or that you needed ingredients that you don’t have at home. We wanted our tool to offer cooking with what we have. »
A few years ago, such a tool would simply have offered a few standardized recipes from a database. The dazzling evolution of artificial intelligence now makes it possible to go much further.
For example, you can ask him for gluten-free meals or on the theme of the color blue. He is bilingual and willingly accepts jokes on request. However, they are of uneven quality, sometimes incomprehensible.
The tool is offered for $5 per month, with a one-week free trial. La Presse tried it for a long time and inherited some very good ideas – for a menu bringing together vegetarians and carnivores, for example – and some audacious proposals. We didn’t try his vegan sandwich of mashed butternut squash, peanut butter, cranberry jam and crushed walnuts. He can refuse certain combinations, such as ground meat and ice cream.
Is there a guarantee that the recipes offered will not be inedible? “We are never safe, agrees Mr. Tremblay. ChefTouski will dig into a fairly large database to obtain a mix of tastes. When you ask him for recipes that don’t make sense, he will still sometimes offer you a recipe and tell you that all tastes are in nature. »
Available on a web browser for a month, ChefTouski has been tested by a thousand first-time users. “We wanted people other than us to try things out,” says Elliott Morneau. “In the short term”, we do not plan to launch mobile applications, which are expensive to develop with the multiplication of platforms and updates, in addition to server costs and the license with OpenAI. “At $5 a month, we want to create a new niche and we wanted to keep the price low enough,” says Tremblay.