This smart display alternative can now use AI to plan all your meals

Skylight is a smart home company that produces a variety of smart display alternatives, such as the Skylight Cal Max. These serve as a central hub for all your daily planning — they’re primarily used as a digital calendar, but you can also use them to track chores, make lists, or meal prep. That last aspect just became much more exciting, as Skylight is officially introducing Sidekick, an AI-powered assistant that can plan all your meals in just a few minutes.

Sidekick is a new AI feature for Skylight devices. It’s capable of generating personalized recipes based on your budget, family size, and dietary restrictions, and it’ll even create a shopping list and load up step-by-step cooking instructions. Skylight hopes the new feature will save families 10 hours every month, as they’ll no longer need to worry about the logistics surrounding meal prep.

Here’s how it works: After launching the Skylight app on your phone, you’ll now see a Sidekick button. Inside this menu is a Plan Meals button. Selecting this allows you to select which days of the week you’d like to generate recipes for, select how many people you’re cooking for, and choose to use only recipes you’ve already cooked or allow Sidekick to generate new recipes. You can also have Sidekick add all the related ingredients to your Grocery List.

The best part, however, is the Notes section. This is where you can type out any restrictions for the AI assistant to follow, such as budget restraints or cooking time limits. For example, I asked Sidekick to “create vegetarian dishes that take less than 30 minutes to prep,” and it offered me a Vegetable Stir-Fry with Tofu and a Caprese Pasta Salad. Along with populating these into my calendar, it provided a list of ingredients and cooking instructions.

Sidekick does more than just create meal plans. It can also import events to your calendar from PDFs or photos, import a recipe from cookbooks or websites, and create lists from photos or screenshots. Skylight notes that Sidekick is currently in beta, and it’s only available to Skylight Plus members. It’s already shaping up to be a great new feature for Skylight devices, and it’ll be exciting to see how it changes during this beta phase.