Products / Cooking Videos

Cooking Videos

Cook from a Chinese video without speaking Chinese. Paste a link to a cooking video or upload one you recorded; a few minutes later you have an English recipe you can cook from, narrated over the original footage.

Open Cooking Videos Get help
The Cooking Videos player on a phone: a chopped-chili fish head recipe, with numbered step markers along the timeline The same recipe's instructions tab: six English steps, each with a play button jumping to that moment in the video
A recipe from a Chinese cooking video, as it appears on a phone: the video with step markers, and the English steps each linked to their moment.

Where it runs

In the browser at cooking.sameatoms.com, on phone or desktop. An iPhone app is in preparation.

Languages

The interface is in English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Recipes come out in English; the original Chinese subtitles stay attached to the video.

What it costs

A new account comes with a free allowance to try it. After that you buy credit packs as you need them — there is no subscription.

How a video becomes a recipe

  1. You paste a link to a cooking video, or upload one you recorded yourself.
  2. The narration is transcribed. If a video has no usable narration — just music over the cooking — the on-screen captions are read instead.
  3. The transcript is translated into English, and the dish name, ingredients and steps are extracted from it. Each step is timed, so it knows which moment of the video it belongs to.
  4. An English narration is generated and laid over the original footage. You can watch the video with English audio, or cook from the steps and jump into the video at any one of them.

Recipes you have processed are saved to your account. You can search them by dish, ingredient or tag, save the ones you cook often, and share a recipe with someone by link.

Your videos and your account

Videos you upload are stored so that they can be processed and played back to you. Delete a video and its files are deleted. Delete your account — from your profile page, at the bottom — and your recipes, uploads and purchase history go with it. There is nothing to email us about first.

The details are in the Privacy Policy; the rules of the road are in the Terms of Service.

Questions

Write to [email protected] with the email address you signed up with. More on the support page.