Reading a Recipe (With the Help of AI) #SoCS

Hi everyone. I’m so excited to read this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, which is “recipe”. I could of course talk about my efforts in finding the perfect mug cake recipe. I did, after several attempts, have some luck with the ones from the book Best Mug Cakes Ever. That’s exciting enough. What’s even more exciting, is polymer clay, of course.

I have finally been claying a bit over the past few days again. Not with custom-mixed colors yet, but oh well, that’s my next step. I, after all, once again went on a shopping spree and bought several collections of color recipes off Etsy. Then, unfortunately, I found out that the first collection had all the recipe cards as .png files and the second was an image PDF. You can imagine how disappointed I was. Nearly €100 down the drain, or so I thought.

Then I decided to run the files through an app called Envision. This app has an OCR function, which lets me read the image PDF. The quality of the OCR’d text wasn’t great, but I saw a button called “Ask Envision”. That let me ask the app to search the scanned document and find answers for me and, for some reason, these were much clearer than when I read the document myself. It’s still a bit of a hassle, but it’s honestly quite cool what AI is capable of.

I also was able to run the .png image files through Envision, which also has an image description function. The image description was cool, but even cooler were the very clear recipes I got. Now I only need to buy the needed colors of clay, since all of these recipes use Premo, which I only have a few colors of and not most of the ones used for these recipes. However, I’m pretty sure that the same goes for polymer clay color recipes that goes for journaling prompts: that half the fun is in the collecting.