Earlier this year, BigOven introduced RecipeScan™, a revolutionary and simple way for you to get your paper and handwritten recipes into the digital world, and ready for easy grocery shopping and menu planning.
Demo Video
What’s RecipeScan? In case you missed it, a short demo video is below:
We’ve processed many thousands of RecipeScan requests so far, and we’ve gotten some terrific feedback from home cooks like you. We’ve also seen areas that needed improvement, and are announcing several such improvements today.
What’s new? Improvements
- We’ve tightened up our quality control pass after data entry is completed. Your RecipeScan may take a little longer to complete (still within the 5 business day window), but you’re going to enjoy even more accuracy.
- There are now complete quality passes before transcription occurs, during the process and after the process is complete.
- RecipeScan is available natively from each of our smartphone apps – Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone. You can also submit JPGs or scans directly at www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan
- The recipe details page on BigOven.com now shows you the original image or images that you submitted. See the sample below – just click on the image to view the original submission.
- Bug fix: We had a few sporadic reports of transposed requests – i.e., a few users received a recipe back from the process that wasn’t the one submitted. We want you to know that we have found and fixed the bug that was causing that, and have fully refunded related credits – we’re very sorry! We believe we’ve handled each of these via support@bigoven.com but if you’re one of those, please try again, or contact us at support@bigoven.com if we can help in any way. Thanks!
- It’s now easy to find the recipes you’ve RecipeScanned: Just visit www.bigoven.com and click Recipes. You’ll see a “Recipes I’ve Posted” link. Click on that, and on the left hand side, limit the filter to recipes “I’ve RecipeScanned”:
Tips
- You can find your recipes by entering the title and your username in “keyword” search. For instance, the recipe above can be found by stevemur when logged in just by searching “tuna stevemur”. In the smartphone apps, be sure you are in “Keyword” search, not title search. And remember, RecipeScans are private by default – you won’t see them unless you are logged in.
- Editing is simple! You can make edits to any RecipeScanned or posted recipe on www.bigoven.com – just make sure you’re logged in, find the recipe, and click the “Edit” button on the right hand side of the page.
- RecipeScan works with handwritten or typed recipes.
- Make sure they are well-lit, in focus, and legible! Also, make sure they have a title – just scribble one on the sheet before you snap a photo.
- Is your recipe more than one page? Don’t submit it via the mobile apps – those can only process one image per recipe. Instead, simply submit your RecipeScan request via our web form at www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan – that can handle up to 3 images per recipe.
Comparison with other tools
A few people have written in asking how this is different than what digital document managers like Evernote or Google Docs does. First, we should point out that while we think these are fantastic tools for generic digital document management, for recipes, we think these tools fall well-short of what BigOven delivers.
To generic document management tools, your recipe is simply unstructured text, just like any other newspaper article or sequence of words. As such, it won’t let you do many things that BigOven does natively:
- Search by ingredients including or NOT including, category (dessert, main dish), other searches – online or from the free smartphone apps
- Add the recipe along with others to a grocery list
- Automatically sort that grocery list by aisle
- Add the recipe to a calendar (Hmm. more on this shortly)
- Scale the recipe up or down
- Get nutrition facts automatically generated
- Automatically convert to metric or US
- Automatically parse the recipe into Title, Instructions, Ingredients, etc. which allows all of this
- Add to a list of Try Soons, Favorites
- Add to Facebook Timeline as what you’re cooking, or share them easily with others in the community
- … and more
In a nutshell, because BigOven knows it’s a recipe, you can do much more with it in the kitchen, and on the go.
Give RecipeScan a try! Visit www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan to learn more, and click “Like” below to share this cool new way to get organized with your cooking friends this holiday season!
