I’m throwing away the cookbooks and using ChatGPT as my personal recipe guru.

I’m a big foodie who loves traveling around the world. During my travels, I often come across dishes I’ve never heard of before. After eating them, I always want the recipe. In those cases, I use ChatGPT to learn all the details about the dish, from the ingredients to the cooking method.

How to use ChatGPT to identify a dish and find its recipe

ChatGPT has been around for a while, but this isn’t the first time it’s been used for cooking – in fact, my colleague Joe tried it out to get cooking suggestions for dinner.

However, the free version of ChatGPT only worked with text prompts – you couldn’t share pictures of dishes to ask for recipes. Image recognition was also available in ChatGPT, but only for paid users of ChatGPT Plus, which uses GPT-4 Turbo.

However, OpenAI recently released the GPT-4o update, which introduced image recognition capabilities to the chatbot. This means you can now pass ChatGPT an image and ask it questions about it – all for free. Note, however, that ChatGPT still offers paid plans, and access to GPT-4o is limited for free users. To get extended access to GPT-4o, you’ll need to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month.

You can use this feature in many situations, such as asking ChatGPT questions, solving math problems, explaining complex engineering diagrams, etc. Here, we will show you how to use the ChatGPT feature to find ingredients and recipes for unknown dishes.

First, open the ChatGPT app on your phone and tap the camera icon to take a photo of your dish. If you already have a photo of your dish in your phone’s gallery, you can tap the image icon instead.

Select the image you want to use and tap Add.

Once you have uploaded the image, you need to type your question in the message bar. I want to know the recipe for the dish in the image, so I type a prompt like “What is the recipe for the dish in this image? Please include the ingredients and instructions” and send the prompt.

ChatGPT will take a few seconds to analyze the image and provide you with all the details requested.

How good are the results compared to Google Lens?

As I mentioned before, I love to travel and this is not the first time I have wondered how to use my smartphone to identify the food I am eating. In fact, I was using Google Lens for exactly that purpose. For those who don’t know, Google Lens has a feature similar to GPT-4o that provides relevant information about an uploaded image.

But the main reason I switched from Google Lens to ChatGPT is because ChatGPT uses the latest technology. In addition, I noticed that Google Lens sometimes fails to correctly identify things in the image. For example, the dish in the picture below is Tandoori Lamb Chop, but Google Lens misidentified it as Tandoori Chicken.

This is just one example. I’ve seen this happen with many dishes. I’ve also noticed that Google Lens often has a hard time identifying a dish if the photo contains multiple items. For example, the image above contains three items: onion, lemon, and tandoori lamb chops. With these multiple items, Google Lens may not be able to correctly identify the dish.

Additionally, unlike ChatGPT, which gives you ingredients and recipes directly, Google Lens suggests websites and YouTube videos that may be related to the dish in the image. This extra step may not be necessary, especially if you’re looking for a quick answer and not a 10-minute video.

So that’s how I use ChatGPT as my personal recipe guru. Now, not only can I take a photo of a dish and learn more about it, but I can also get an interesting picture of a dish online and use ChatGPT to get information about that dish.

However, keep in mind that even with all the new updates, ChatGPT is still an AI chatbot and results may be inaccurate, so double-check the recipes and ingredients provided instead of blindly following the suggestions.