News Corp Australia’s Taste food brand has launched an AI recipe assistant, helping its users find recipes based on available ingredients and specific dietary preferences.

TasteBud is its first consumer-facing AI feature, and offers offers app subscribers an interactive way to explore Taste’s 50,000 triple-tested recipes through a custom-built conversational agent.

The chat experience allows for follow-up queries, improving search results for a more personalised experience.

Taste.com.au, which has a monthly audience of 4.5 million, uses a custom-built conversational agent. Free news and lifestyle managing director and publisher Pippa Leary says in an INMA blog, the launch underscored a commitment to helping consumers with straightforward solutions.

“Our digital food products are focused on enhancing the user experience and this is a great example of how we’re optimising our content and addressing the consumer need for efficiency to deliver them greater value,” she said.

TasteBud leads the way for future AI developments, supporting our growth and market-first offerings for consumers and clients.”

Head of food, travel and health Kerrie McCallum says the app simplifies and personalises the recipe search process. “It helps the Taste audience solve problems, finding recipes that match their cooking ideas, ingredients, and preferences to our world-leading and extensive recipe database.

“TasteBud goes beyond basic search functionality to deliver highly relevant suggestions, especially when contextual prompts such as ‘limited time’ are added. We are in the early phases of this exciting journey and TasteBud already has an impressive accuracy rate of 99 per cent, with ‘chicken’ being the most common query.”

McCallum says Taste’s deeply engaged audience consumes 68 million page views a month and generates 99 million data points daily, providing unrivalled consumer intent data into what Australians are planning, shopping, cooking and sharing in food.