KitchMe Launches Recipe Search Engine For Google Glass

KitchMe, a recipe and meal-planning website recently acquired by Coupons.com, has launched what appears to be the first recipe search engine and cooking assistant app for Google Glass.

The app is free and currently available at kitchme.com/googleglass.

I wore Glass in my own kitchen about a month ago and immediately thought it would be fun to be able to use it to get cooking directions, and that’s the main thing KitchMe’s app does. There are a few extra bells and whistles for existing KitchMe users, but I’m not one, so my testing is focused primarily on the recipe search engine.

The app invites you to speak an ingredient (or multiple ingredients) and sends your search to its database to find matches. Within a minute or two, KitchMe then sends back matching recipes that have at least a four-star rating. In my testing, the app sent back anywhere from 3-6 recipes for each search I did.

Those are the three recipes I received on a search for “sirloin steak.” They’re not the top three matches on KitchMe.com for the same search, but they are in the top 10 results. (It’s not clear to me why the app results aren’t the same as the website.)

Once you choose a recipe, the app provides a list of ingredients and step-by-step cooking directions.

Tapping on each step will tell Glass to read the instruction aloud. Each cooking step is on its own card, which means some recipes will require a lot of swiping. (That’s why I had more voice commands like “move left” and “move right” on my list of 14 things Google Glass needs.) KitchMe says a future version of its app could enable fully hands-free navigation.

One thing I’d like to see KitchMe do — and maybe it already does for existing users — is let me customize how many recipes I get back for each search.

Another oversight the app makes is not indicating where each recipe comes from. According to its website search results, the sirloin steak recipes above are from (L-R) Food.com, AllRecipes and Food Network. That should be included in the app’s interface, too.

Those things aside, KitchMe looks like it could be a winner with a recipe search app that appeals to a much wider audience than many of the existing Glass apps. KitchMe and the promised Trulia real estate search app stand to be two of the more mainstream Glass apps around and could even help sell Glass itself to general consumers (along with existing apps like Facebook, Twitter, CNN and the New York Times).