COOPii: A Conversational Cooking App

We are developing COOPii, a conversational cooking app that makes everyday cooking more enjoyable.

"What should I cook today?"

Life gets busy. You shop for ingredients, prepare a main dish, sides, and soup at the same time, and clean up afterward. Cooking is an essential part of daily life, yet before you know it, it starts to feel like a burden.

We want to make everyday cooking more fun and a little lighter. That is why we are building COOPii, a conversational cooking app.

Three Core Experiences COOPii Provides

Personalized Meal Suggestions

Based on ingredients, cooking time, nutritional balance, preferences, and allergy information, AI searches recipes on the web and suggests an optimal meal plan. For example, if you ask, "What healthy dinner can I make with chicken and onions in under 30 minutes?" it immediately gives you options.

Real-Time Guidance Across Multiple Dishes

In real kitchens, people often cook several dishes at once - a main, sides, and soup - but most conventional recipes assume you are making just one dish. With COOPii, if you are making hamburger steak and potato salad, for example, it can guide you through an efficient sequence in real time by voice: "Start boiling the potatoes, then chop the onions while they cook, saute half for the hamburger patties, and use the rest for the salad."

Hands-Free Voice Control

Cooking often gets interrupted every time you touch your phone, wash your hands, and operate the screen.

With COOPii, even when your hands are messy, you can simply say, "What is the next step?", "Set a 10-minute timer," or "What can I use instead of soy sauce?" and control it all with your voice. We also care about making cooking feel less like a task and more like a fun, conversational experience.

Why We Built COOPii

This started from my own experience. I became so absorbed in work I loved that I ended up eating convenience-store meals late at night day after day. Eventually, that unhealthy lifestyle caught up with me and I got sick.

That was the moment I realized a painful contradiction: I was supposed to be using technology to enrich the world, and yet I could not even enrich my own daily life.

Even so, when I actually tried to cook healthy meals, I found it honestly exhausting.

You have to decide what to make, buy the ingredients, and cook several dishes at once. And you have to do it every day. When I talked to friends about how they handled it, they kept saying things like, "Planning meals is hard" and "I want to stop feeling guilty about relying on prepared foods."

This turned out to be a challenge shared by many people. Of course, there are already many competing apps that tackle similar issues.

But now, advances in voice interaction and generative AI have created a perfect opportunity to solve this problem in a better way. By combining about 15 years of my development experience with cutting-edge AI and the perspective of someone living this problem firsthand, I believe we can reinvent the entire cooking process. Make cooking time enjoyable. Help everyone live healthier lives.

That is the world we are determined to create with COOPii.