How Speakeater works.

A free AI cooking app, an AI recipe generator, a pantry scanner, and a 4,000-cocktail bar — built into one Android app. Here's the actual mechanism.

01The pantry scan

Speakeater is a single-photo pantry scanner. Open the camera inside the app, point it at the open fridge or your cupboard, and take a few photos — shelf, drawer, door, freezer, however many it takes to cover what you own. The app uses on-device and cloud computer vision (Google ML Kit barcode + Anthropic Claude vision OCR) to read the labels, brand names, jars, and produce. It builds a structured pantry list with quantity estimates and pre-fills expiration windows for perishables.

This is the hardest problem in AI cooking apps. Most "AI recipe app" alternatives — SuperCook, Cooklist, Whisk — make you type each ingredient or scan barcodes one by one. Speakeater treats the photograph as the source of truth and asks you to confirm or correct, not to type from scratch.

Privacy note: the photographs are extracted on the device when possible. Anything that needs cloud OCR is processed and discarded within 24 hours. We extract data, not images.

02Recipe matching by what you already own

Every recipe in Speakeater's catalog (23,000+ food recipes plus 4,000+ cocktails) gets a real-time pantry-match score against your inventory. The dish that uses nine of your ingredients ranks above the dish that uses two. The expiration weighting boosts anything that uses something about to turn — a half fennel bulb in the back of the drawer ranks recipes that use fennel to the top.

This is the core of an AI recipe generator that actually works: it doesn't make up dishes, it ranks real recipes by your real kitchen.

03Tonight mode — step-by-step cooking

Tap a recipe and Tonight mode walks you through the cook. Built-in timers per step. Heat-level callouts. One-line tips that explain why, written by a person who has burned the garlic before. Hands-free auto-advance if you want it. Cuisine-tinted cards across 17 traditions so the deck reads at a glance.

The free tier caps at 20 swipes a day on the Tonight deck. Anti-doom-scroll by design — finite attention forces real decisions and dramatically reduces food waste. Pro removes the cap.

04The Mixology cellar — 4,000 cocktails, half from before Prohibition

Behind the kitchen is the bar. Speakeater's Mixology section ships with nearly 4,000 cocktails: about half the cellar is transcribed by hand from pre-prohibition bartender's manuscripts no modern bar uses. The five spine manuscripts:

• Jerry Thomas — How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion, 1862, New York
• Leo Engel — American & Other Drinks, 1878, London (Criterion)
• Harry Johnson — New & Improved Bartender's Manual, 1882, New York
• William T. Boothby — The World's Drinks & How to Mix Them, 1908, San Francisco
• Hugo Ensslin — Recipes for Mixed Drinks, 1917, New York (the last bartender's manual published before American Prohibition)

Each cocktail card has two modes. Bootlegger mode shows the original manuscript page in the bartender's own words — chiaroscuro parchment with mottled aging, the kind of detail that lets a serious cocktail nerd read what Jerry Thomas actually wrote in 1862. Mixologist mode shows the modern measured build with proper measurements, the right glass, the ABV, garnish, and a button to send the missing bottles to your shopping list.

05Snap bar — the home cellar scan

Same camera trick as the pantry, but pointed at your back-bar. Speakeater reads what bottles you already own and reorders the Mixology cellar so cocktails you can actually make right now rank above the ones that need three bottles you don't have. A Sazerac that needs four spirits you don't have stops getting suggested.

06Plan it for me — the AI meal-prep planner

Hit Plan it for me on a Sunday. Speakeater picks seven dinners that use what's in your kitchen, prioritizes the ingredients about to turn, and varies the cuisine across the week. Don't like a pick? Swap it in two taps for something with similar cuisine and similar cook time.

07Shopping list, reconciled against your pantry

Pull a recipe in, tap Shop. Anything already in your pantry gets stripped out automatically. Anything you tagged as low gets added. Items group by aisle so you walk the store once. Bar gets its own aisle for the cellar pour list.

08The substitution engine (Pro)

If a recipe wants crème fraîche and you have sour cream, the substitution engine flags the swap inline so you can cook the dish you wanted with what you actually own. Same for proteins, herbs, vinegars, oils. This is what separates an AI recipe generator from a static cookbook — it adapts to your kitchen, not the other way.

09Pricing

• Speakeater Free: $0, forever. Light banner ads + occasional interstitials. Three pantry scans per month, the full cellar, the cookbook. The free tier never sunsets.
• Speakeater Pro Monthly: $4.99/month. Removes ads. Unlimited scans, unlimited recipe matches, recipe versioning, automatic dinner-and-drink pairings, the AI substitution engine, the reconciled shopping list.
• Speakeater Pro Annual: $29.99/year — half off the monthly rate. Same Pro feature set.
• Speakeater Pro Lifetime: $59.99 once. Pre-launch pricing. Goes up after launch week.