This previous week in Japan, Sony unveiled a challenge they’ve been creating in secret known as Roku Shoku, a culinary recording system designed to seize precisely how a chef prepares a meal. The system additionally serves as a steering device, serving to informal or inexperienced cooks create dishes with the precision of an skilled with years of coaching.
Sony has been engaged on this challenge, which stands for “File” (Roku) and “Cooking” (Shoku), for the previous 5 years. Final week, the leisure and shopper electronics large held the first-ever press demonstration of the recording studio for The Spoon staff.
“We have now a recording studio right here in Tokyo,” stated Tomoko Nomoto, Undertaking Chief for Roku Shoku. “We invite Michelin-starred cooks, and even grandmothers, to the studio and ask them to prepare dinner with our system. We then file their culinary knowledge, together with temperature, steam ranges, and your entire cooking course of.”
The challenge is led by a Sony R&D staff out of Tokyo and is separate from analysis within the space of gastronomy that has taken place at Sony’s AI Analysis division Sony AI (the formal Gastronomy program introduced in 2020 has been sunsetted, however Sony continues to work on gastronomy-related tasks). Since launching the Tokyo recording studio in 2021, the staff has captured hundreds of recipes throughout a variety of cuisines, together with Japanese, Chinese language, French, Italian, and Thai.
The Roku Shoku system options induction cooktops with temperature sensors, scales to watch and weigh components, cameras to seize a chef’s actions, and an off-the-shelf sport controller made by Steam to manage the setup.
Nomoto shared that customers can replicate meals exactly as cooks prepare dinner them, a declare I examined myself. You may watch me attempting it within the video beneath.
In accordance with Nomoto, the aim is to make use of Roku Shoku each to doc recipes for eating places and meals service areas and to protect culinary creations for future use.
“Step one will likely be to work with eating places that need to share a constant expertise worldwide or recreate dishes which are not out there, like when a chef passes away or retires,” stated Nomoto.
Spoon readers may recall Cloudchef, one other system that data chef creations. Nomoto defined a key distinction: Sony plans for Roku Shoku to allow solely human cooks to recreate these meals, whereas Cloudchef ultimately goals to make use of robots for meal replication. Presently, each techniques are targeted solely on human use (see Spoon’s Tiffany McClurg utilizing the Cloudchef system right here).
The corporate has launched an internet site the place you’ll find out extra and request a demo.
