Apple Intelligence in Marinaid
Marinaid uses Apple Intelligence to do the tedious parts of getting a recipe into your library and out of it again. All of it runs on your device — your recipes are never sent to a server for AI processing.
What it’s used for
Section titled “What it’s used for”- Reading recipes from social video. Marinaid pulls the caption, on-screen text, and spoken narration out of a TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook video and turns them into a structured recipe.
- Reading recipes from photos. Cookbook pages, recipe cards, handwriting, screenshots.
- Sorting your grocery list. Items are grouped into aisles — produce, dairy, meat, pantry — so you shop the store in order.
- Prep steps before you cook. Marinaid works out the knife work and long-lead tasks — chopping, soaking, marinating, bringing things to room temperature — that are worth doing before step one, and puts them on their own page in front of it.
- Scaling awkward ingredients. “1 egg, separated” and “a 2-inch piece of ginger” don’t scale by multiplying a number. Marinaid rewrites those lines properly when you change the serving count.
- Drink pairings. Wine, beer, and non-alcoholic suggestions based on the dish.
- Sorting recipes by meal. Imported recipes get filed as breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert, or drinks.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”Apple Intelligence has to be supported by your device and turned on in Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri. Marinaid checks this each time an AI feature runs, so if you turn it off, the app notices straight away.
If Apple Intelligence is unavailable, every one of these features has a non-AI fallback and the app keeps working. Photo import falls back to standard text recognition, grocery items land in a general category you can re-sort by hand, prep steps are worked out by a simpler set of rules reading your ingredient list rather than by the model, and ingredient scaling uses straightforward arithmetic. You’ll get a plainer result, not an error.
Sharper photo reading on newer devices Requires iOS 27
Section titled “Sharper photo reading on newer devices ”On iOS 27, Marinaid can hand the recipe photo itself to Apple Intelligence rather than a flattened transcription of the words in it. That means the model sees the layout — which is usually where the meaning lives:
- Two-column cookbook pages get read column by column instead of straight across, so ingredients stop getting interleaved with instructions.
- Ingredient group headings (“For the sauce”, “Marinade”) are recognised as headings, so each group becomes its own section.
- Handwriting is read in context rather than character by character.
This needs iOS 27 and a device with a vision-capable on-device model — roughly iPhone 15 Pro and newer. Everywhere else, photo import keeps using text recognition exactly as before, and you don’t have to choose or configure anything: Marinaid uses the better path when your device offers it and the old one when it doesn’t.
Asking Siri for things
Section titled “Asking Siri for things”Apple Intelligence also decides where a spoken request goes. Marinaid publishes its features to iOS as App Intents, so Siri can route straight to the right one instead of just opening the app.
Asking what’s on your meal plan or grocery list gets you a card you can read at a glance rather than just a spoken list.
On iOS 27 that extends to recipe names: “Hey Siri, open Chicken Piccata in Marinaid” opens that recipe, with no setup and no fixed phrase to memorise.
The same intents are building blocks in the Shortcuts app, so you can chain Marinaid into automations — your weekly plan feeding a shopping routine, for example.
Siri & Shortcuts has the full list, including the handful of things iOS won’t let any app do by voice.
Your data
Section titled “Your data”Nothing is sent anywhere for AI processing. Marinaid uses the on-device Apple Intelligence model, which is also why it needs a reasonably recent iPhone or iPad — the model is running on your hardware, not in a data centre.
That distinction is worth spelling out, because it changed in iOS 27. Apple Intelligence now has two models available to apps: the on-device one, and a larger one that runs on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers for work the phone can’t do alone. They are separate — an app has to deliberately opt in to the server model, and Apple doesn’t silently escalate from one to the other.
Marinaid only ever uses the on-device model. We haven’t opted into the server model, so no part of your recipe — no caption, no photo, no transcript — leaves your phone for AI processing, on iOS 27 or any other version.