iCookbook: An elegant, voice controlled cookbook for iPad

While the experience of using interactive digital cookbooks on the iPad is great, it does come with one drawback — your ingredients usually end up on the screen.

iCookbook has cleverly solved the issue of a messy, mucked up screen by including a voice control feature that gives users control over two thousand recipes handsfree.

The user interface is gorgeous and neatly sorts dishes in various categories such as themes, occasions, vegetarian and an ingredients section which helps users build a meal around the ingredients you have on hand in the kitchen.

In an effort to refine the searches, iCookbook offers users a way to use multiple filters that can all be activated at once, allowing users to narrow down recipes based on factors like ingredients, consumer brands, grilled food or the ethnicity of the dish. Using the meal building filters, cooks are given complete control over searches and could potentially save users a lot time.

Within a recipe, foodies can view high-quality images, add the dish to favourites, create notes, send the ingredients to a shopping list or share it with friends via Facebook or email. Making a conversion, finding ingredient substitutions and setting timers are also provided within the recipe tools.

While cooking up a storm with your hands full of goo, there’s a list of voice commands that assist users in navigating through the steps of the recipe. Voice commands can also display the status of cooking timers or open notes –all without ever touching the screen. And nicely, your favourite family recipes can be converted to digital form by inputting a dish directly within the app.

Bottom Line:

The idea of a voice control feature within a cooking app seems so obvious yet it’s not included in any of the iPad recipe apps I’ve seen. All in all, the large bank of recipes, meal builder feature, voice controls and the option to easily add ingredients to a shopping list earns iCookbook the title of a must-have app for the kitchen. iCookbook is available for $3.99 in the app store.