Documentation
Import & the Assistant
Get recipes in without typing them, and work on your library with an AI that stages every change for your review.
The Assistant
The Assistant page is a chat with an AI that knows your kitchen. It's a helping hand for the tedious parts: it can search your recipes and the web, import recipes from pages or photos, and rework what you already have ("make my pancakes vegan", "scale my bolognese to 6 servings").
The important rule: the assistant never changes your library directly. Everything it proposes is staged for review, and nothing touches your recipes until you apply it.
Every conversation is saved. The Assistant page lists them all, searchable by title, so an import you started last week is still there to finish.
Chatting
Type a request, or attach photos with the photo button (pasting and drag-and-drop work too). While the assistant works you'll see its progress live: what it's searching, which pages it's fetching, what it's staging. A new chat offers starter suggestions if you're not sure what to ask.
The Workbench
The moment a recipe is staged, the session turns into a workbench: the full recipe editor takes over the main pane and the chat moves to a side panel (two tabs on a phone). You can:
- Hand-edit the proposal in the normal recipe editor, and save your edits.
- Open Changes to see a field-by-field diff of what the assistant proposes: green for added, yellow for changed, red for removed.
- Preview the recipe as readers would see it.
- Keep chatting: ask for another tweak and the proposal updates.
- Revert your hand edits back to the assistant's version, or discard the proposal entirely.
When you're happy, Save to library (for a new recipe) or Apply (for an edit) makes it real and takes you to the saved recipe.
Advanced: staging details
Staged items appear as pills above the chat composer; a session can hold several at once (a recipe plus the new catalog ingredients it needs, for example). Staged ingredients are applied to the shared catalog together with the recipe, and recipe lines not yet linked to a catalog entry are linked or created by name on apply.
If someone edits the underlying recipe while a proposal is pending, applying flags a merge conflict and lists the clashing fields; the "Ask AI to resolve" button hands the conflict back to the assistant. And if the assistant updates an item while you have unsaved hand edits, you choose which version wins; your edits are never silently overwritten.
Ask AI from a Recipe
On any recipe's edit page, the Ask AI button starts an assistant session about that recipe: "make this vegetarian", "add a section for the sauce". The assistant sees the last saved version, so save your own edits first if they matter.
Importing a Recipe
Import Recipe takes a recipe in whatever form you have it and turns it into a proper Foodex recipe. Give it any combination of:
- A URL of a recipe page on the web.
- Photos: cookbook pages, screenshots, handwritten cards. Any language works, with automatic translation.
- Pasted text.
- Optional context for the extraction: the language, the recipe's name, how many it serves.
The import runs as an assistant session and drops you straight into the workbench: the extracted recipe appears in the editor for you to check and save. Reviewing matters most for handwriting and unusual layouts; amounts are the thing to double-check.
Imports you never finished wait under "Pending Imports" on the import page (and in your Assistant conversations), so nothing is lost by closing the tab.
Bulk Import
To capture a whole recipe book, use Bulk import: photograph every page, drop the lot in, and group the pages so each group is one recipe. Merge a photo into the previous group when a recipe spans pages; a full-screen viewer helps you compare neighboring pages while grouping.
One click then imports them all, a couple at a time, with per-recipe progress. Each becomes a regular assistant session you review at your own pace, now or later.