Recipe app and cooking assistant Pestle is taking AI to the next level by making it easier to save recipes from social media, and isn't using the OpenAI chat technology. Instead, in its latest version, Pestle added the capability to import recipes directly from Instagram Reels using on-device machine learning so that you can very quickly process that recipe and add it to your collection.

The result is a feature that can save recipes you find when scrolling Reels "nearly instantaneously," says Pestle's developer Will Bishop.

Launched first in 2022, Bishop created Pestle to address the common problem of finding recipes on the web. Unfortunately, today's recipe websites have become cluttered with ads and long stories while the actual recipe is found at the bottom of the page. He would copy recipes from the web into Apple's Notes app where he would then add his own tweaks and tips. The system wasn't organized because, of course, Notes was never designed to be a recipe database.

That led Bishop to build an app called Pestle, which lets you save recipes from the web by tapping the "Share" button from your iOS browser and then picking the app as the destination. Beyond importing and organizing recipes, the app helps plan meals, create shopping lists, keeps up with new recipes from creators, navigates with voice commands, and even cooks hands-free or with friends and family remotely over Apple's SharePlay feature for FaceTime.

Saving recipes from the web was one pain point, but users have long been clamoring for a way to save from Instagram, too, Bishop says.

The point is, he says that he had always pushed back at the idea of these recipes being written in ways that could be written "a million different ways-over quite literally-and that thought of parsing all of them seemed like a gargantuan task." He recalls seeing other recipe apps grapple with this same task but all seeming to have buckled under the challenge: "all seemed to collapse back to just making a call to ChatGPT and making the user wait sometimes up to a minute to get a response.

According to the developer, his reasons for not wanting to integrate with ChatGPT included a few processing times and more significantly, concern over how OpenAI's relationship went over privacy. And he adds, by offloading parsing to third parties Pestle could mean downtime would come, and there will be no response improvement by anyone until such time when that third party, for instance, like OpenAI released a faster or an even more accurate model.

That's why Bishop began to look into the notion of using on-device machine learning instead. This way, it could be much faster, and he'd have control over the process in terms of how it would be managed on the device.

"The slowest part of the operation is just the request to fetch the Reel's caption; the processing itself happens in about one-tenth of a second," he says.

According to Bishop, you'll be able to share any Instagram Reel with Pestle to save recipes just like saving from the web. Importing any plain-text recipe is also supported by the app.

The updated version of Pestle is free to download on the iOS App Store. More features include a discover section for cooking inspiration, 14-day meal planning support, shopping lists with Apple Reminders integration, and much more for subscribers.