Silicon Valley’s ‘SeeFood’ App Is Now Real Thanks To Pinterest

Photo: Marco Verch (Wikimedia Commons)

A recent episode of HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley featured the ideation of an app called SeeFood. The app was pitched as a “Shazam for food” concept that allowed you to see recipes and dietary information when you pointed your smartphone camera at a dish. On the actual TV show, they were only able to create tech that told you whether an object was a hot dog or not.

Pinterest, however, has created a real-life version of SeeFood within their own app. While The Verge confirmed that Pinterest’s release of this feature around the same time as the Silicon Valley episode was merely “coincidental,” the real tech behaves extremely similar to what was conceived on the show.

.@SiliconHBO! Tell Jian Yang I think I may have found the best of both worlds? pic.twitter.com/Y6WZp9dmUY

— Pinterest Lens (@PinterestLens) May 16, 2017

Pinterest’s new feature is an upgrade to the app’s visual search tool, Pinterest Lens, that is being marketed as “real-time dish recognition” that highlights specific key words relating to what the dish your smartphone camera is focused on is, and can even look up recipe recommendations from within its own app.

What’s really great about it is that you can train your smartphone’s camera onto any dish or food and quickly get multiple new recipe ideas to try out. Sounds like a pretty cool concept to me.