What started as a batter-smeared idea is now Delish’s latest entrée into AI: a voice-activated recipe assistant called Cooking Coach. Built in a few months and trained exclusively on Delish’s 30,000-strong recipe archive, the tool lets users cook hands-free, juggling tasks like ingredient swaps, timers, and portion adjustments without touching a screen. The project, born from Hearst’s AI team and Delish’s editorial and product leads, officially launched across the site after five months of development.
As generative AI tools increasingly steal traffic from lifestyle publishers by serving instant answers (like, say, entire recipes), Delish needed a way to get users engaged with and addicted to its own turf. AI consultants are calling these kinds of tools “utility-driven experiences” that reflect a larger shift in user behavior—less reading, more doing. Delish has already seen its search traffic take a hit from Google’s AI summaries, but the team is betting that giving visitors an actual, personalized sous chef will keep them coming back.
Usage data from the Cooking Coach chats are already being monitored for patterns to guide future updates. On the horizon: smarter search functions powered by natural language, plus a potential “camera-to-recipe” model that could analyze what’s in your pantry and suggest meals.
Full story at Digiday.