Auto Chef

Share a recipe from Instagram or any cooking site, and Auto Chef extracts the full recipe automatically — ingredients, instructions, cook times, and all. No more pausing videos and typing things out by hand.

How it works

Auto Chef runs a multimodal extraction pipeline that combines three approaches to handle recipes in any format:

• Audio transcription — OpenAI Whisper transcribes spoken instructions from video
• Video frame OCR — Tesseract OCR + OpenCV reads on-screen text and ingredient lists
• HTML parsing — BeautifulSoup scrapes structured recipe data from web pages

GPT-4o-mini ties it all together, merging the extracted data into a clean, structured recipe.

Results

• ~97% faster than manual entry — captures a full recipe in seconds instead of ~10 minutes of pausing, rewinding, and typing
• Handles video, text, and hybrid formats from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and recipe sites

Tech stack

• Mobile: React Native + Expo with native Android share intents via deep linking
• Backend: Express.js + Notion API, deployed with Docker + Caddy (auto-HTTPS)
• Processing: Python pipeline — OpenAI Whisper, GPT-4o-mini, Tesseract OCR, OpenCV, yt-dlp, BeautifulSoup
• Storage: Notion as primary DB, SQLite for on-device caching