OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand. Last year it launched its “Oicy” initiative at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe. The Oicy Water is the first piece of hardware designed internally at Coopad and is part of Cookpad’s larger plan of being at the center of a connected kitchen.

Eventually, that digital recipe will talk with the water device and automatically dispense the exact amount of water with the proper hardness recommended. Let’s say you are making a pasta, a Cookpad recipe could tell you to boil it in water that is 20 percent hard water.

While it’s still a ways off, Cookpad’s plan is to fine tune recipes on its site with precise hardness controls. This is where Cookpad’s device could come in handy. It turns out, however, that whether you use hard or soft water can impact the flavor of what you cook. You may know on some level the difference between hard and soft water-hard water contains minerals like calcium and magnesium, and soft water is treated and the only ions in there are sodium. Controls on the device as well as an accompanying mobile app allow you to control the hardness of the water you’ll cook with by mixing the contents of the two bottles as it dispenses. It works by affixing a bottle of hard water and a bottle of soft water to the top of the machine. Oicy Water, which is still very much in the prototype phase, was unveiled at the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan today. Cookpad, the Tokyo-based global recipe hosting site, revealed that it is developing its own hardware design ambitions with a new connected hard and soft water dispensing device called Oicy Water.