SONY's gastronomy flagship project wants to apply AI to cooking

launched in 2019, SONY AI is a company by SONY corporation that promotes fundamental research and development of artificial intelligence (AI) with the aim of creating AI that unleashes human imagination and creativity. in addition to gaming and imaging & sensing, the company wants to set gastronomy as its flagship theme for new technical and business explorations, applying AI to new recipe creations.

images by SONY AI

dubbed the gastronomy flagship project, this program by SONY AI wants to create robotic solutions that can assist chefs in their cooking processes. recipe creation is a challenging area for AI as there are infinite ingredient combinations as well as constraints such as location, climate, season, and a person’s health and food preferences. due to its vast capacity to process data, SONY AI can utilize a variety of sources – including recipes and ingredient data, such as taste, aroma, flavor, molecular structure, nutrients, etc. – to develop a recipe creation app that will be powered by proprietary AI algorithms to assist the world’s top level chefs in their creative process of ingredient pairing, recipe design and menu creation. through this app, SONY AI aims not only to assist in making delicious food, but also to contribute to people’s health and the sustainability of the environment.

‘when talking about robotics in the kitchen, SONY AI knows it’s not easy to create a robot that can work in harmony with chefs as this would need to replicate and sometimes exceed the chef’s skills and techniques,’ comments hiroaki kitano, CEO of SONY AI inc. ‘this is precisely the reason that Sony AI will pursue this grand challenge through the research and development of an advanced and precise chef assisting cooking robot that can be an ultimate assistant to world-class chefs.’

interested in learning more? head over to SONY AI where a series of online interviews with the world’s greatest visionary chefs and professionals in the gastronomy industry is available.