These GE Appliances smart ovens can now know what they’re cooking

If you have a smart GE Appliances wall oven, it’s about to get smarter. Cookcam AI is a new feature that uses artificial intelligence to recognize what you put in the oven and figure out the rest for you, so you don’t need to hover over it and worry about burning your pizza. The company says Cookcam AI is coming to select GE Profile and Café wall ovens with in-oven cameras via a free over-the-air software upgrade.

Cookcam AI will work with Precision Cooking Mode, which is a feature already on most connected GE Appliances ovens, including Monogram, Café, GE Profile, and GE models. Precision Cooking Mode allows for guided cooking that takes you step by step through setting the appliance correctly for your dish using the oven’s touchscreen or GE Appliances’ SmartHQ app. With Cookcam AI you won’t need to look for the right mode, it will do it for you.

“Once the food is placed in the oven and the door is shut, the camera takes images of the oven cavity and uses AI and machine learning to detect and identify the food,” the company said in a press release. The oven then shows the recommended Precision Cooking Mode on the LCD touchscreen, and — assuming it’s right — you just tap it to get it cooking. The oven then automatically tracks the food’s progress and can modify temperatures and adjust cook times as needed, according to GE Appliances.

Initially, Cookcam AI will only work for five dishes — turkey, cookies, pizza, cakes, and brownies. GE Appliances says it plans to roll out more updates. “We are just getting started and look forward to continuing to introduce more food types in the future,” said Rachael Schwartz, executive director of product management and built-in cooking at GE Appliances.

How useful this function will be remains to be seen, but it’s a step toward more intelligence in our appliances that could lead to a smarter, more helpful kitchen. Food recognition is not new — it was a core function of the excellent but now discontinued June Oven. Samsung recently introduced a similar feature called AI Pro Cooking to its Bespoke wall oven, which also uses a camera and optimizes cooking settings while monitoring food.

But while the Samsung oven can recognize 80 different dishes and ingredients compared to GE Appliances’ five, you have to buy a whole new oven to get Samsung’s features. GE Appliances says the free Cookcam AI update will be available at the end of this month.