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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

McCormick SUMR HITS 5000 Grill Plays Music Based on What You’re Cooking

A perfect summer evening for many is grilling in the backyard with good friends, good, beer and good tunes. Flavor company McCormick is trying — maybe a little too hard — to capitalize on that last one.

A few days ago the spice giant announced it had teamed up with fellow grill stalwarts French’s Mustard, Stubb’s Bar-B-Q Sauce, Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and Frank’s RedHot to create SUMR HITS 5000. It may sound like a sub-par CD compilation from the early 2000’s but the SUMR HITS 5000 is actually a grill integrated with a DJ system that switches up tracks based on what you’re cooking.

The press release doesn’t dive too deeply into how the whole DJ-ing bit actually works — only that McCormick is using custom hardware and software based on machine learning algorithms to “produce beats based on food placement and product usage, ultimately creating custom music tracks.”

Based off of the promo video below, it looks like the SUMR HITS 5000 links pre-recorded music and sounds to a weight-sensitive condiment tray and the grill itself. So when you pick up the hot sauce or flip your veggie burger, new sound bites play from a speaker presumably embedded somewhere inside the grill.

McCormick Presents: SUMR HITS 5000

Yes, this is absolutely a gimmicky marketing ploy. Yes, the entire concept absolutely sounds like it was dreamed up by a bunch of dads trying a little too hard to resonate with the “youth.”

However, the SUMR HITS 5000 is an interesting new effort on McCormick’s part to capitalize off of a red-hot (sorry) food trend: flavor and AI. Just a few months ago, the spice giant teamed up with IBM on a new initiative that uses AI to develop better spice mixes more quickly and efficiently. The company also has its Flavorprint service, which draws on consumers’ recipe search histories to recommend new spice-driven recipes.

It’s unclear if this is just a one-off or if McCormick plans to go on tour with or eventually sell the SUMR HITS 5000. Now if they could get on creating a grill that dispenses beers along with the beats, that would be great.

Interested in learning more about the intersection of flavor and AI? McCormick’s Chief Science Officer Hamed Faridi will be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October! Grab your tickets here. 

Update: A previous version incorrectly stated that the SUMR HITS 5000 didn’t work with ketchup.

Briggo Lands its Robot Barista at the SFO Airport Next Month

If you have an early flight out of San Francisco International (SFO) airport at the end of next month, you can caffeinate up with the help of Briggo’s robot barista. The Austin, TX based company announced today that it will launch its automated Coffee Haus robot-coffee kiosk at SFO on July 28th UPDATE: Briggo informed us after publication that it has changed the date and will be up in the coming month.

The Briggo Coffee Haus is a fully automated kiosk that serves a variety of hot and cold coffee and tea drinks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers can order a coffee ahead of time using the Briggo app or purchase one through the machine’s tablet.

The SFO Coffee Haus is the first Briggo machine outside of Texas and will be located inside Terminal 3 next to the security entrance. Though Briggo thinks of itself as a coffee company that sources and roasts its own beans, it will feature rotating blends of Bay Area coffee from Verve and techie-favorite, Sightglass. This will be the second airport location for Briggo’s automated barista: the first one opened at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in July of last year, and a second Briggo machine was added there last month.

Briggo isn’t even the only coffee robot going into SFO this year. San Francisco-based company Cafe X will also be launching its automated coffee kiosk later this summer. We reached out to the company to confirm the installation date and will update when we hear back.

You’ll be seeing a lot more automated eating and drinking experiences at airports in the coming years. Robots like Briggo and Cafe X will be joined by high-end vending machines like Yo-Kai Express, which offer a Michelin star chef-created menu. Food robots will be able to quickly and conveniently feed the high volume of people in a hurry at all hours of the day (and never spell your name wrong on your coffee cup).

To promote its SFO opening, Briggo has hooked up with Lyft to provide Briggo patrons with a 15 percent discount on their next Lyft ride to or from SFO. Normally, we wouldn’t mention marketing campaigns, but this discount is another example of food and beverage companies working with ride-sharing companies to, err, drive traffic. In a similar move, TGIFriday’s has been handing out Uber vouchers to pay for customers’ rides to its restaurants.

We haven’t had Briggo’s coffee yet (haven’t flown to Austin in a while), but it’s got a 4-star rating on Yelp, where customers mostly marvel at the technology. Maybe we’ll need to book a flight down to San Francisco just for a chance to try the coffee.

Dishcraft Comes Out of Stealth, Shows Off its New Robot Dishwasher and Dishes as a Service

We knew Dishcraft was working on a dishwashing robot, but until today, we didn’t know what it would look like. The company publicly unveiled its robot and I’ll be honest, it’s not what I was expecting.

Meant for high-volume eateries like cafeterias, there are two parts to the Dishcraft system. First, dirty dishes are dropped off and stacked vertically on a special cart. Once full, a human wheels the cart into the machine, which grabs each dish individually and inserts it into a rotating wheel. The wheel spins the dirty plate face down and into position where it’s sprayed with water and scrubbed clean in seconds. The scrubbed plate is then rotated again where cameras and computer vision software inspect it for any debris left on the plate before exiting the machine into a dishrack or going back in for another scrub. Check out this video of it in action:

Dishcraft Dishwashing Robot in Action

There are some things to note about the Dischraft system. First, it only does dishware — not glasses or silverware. Those are still done by traditional dishwashing machines. Dishcraft also doesn’t sanitize the dishes, that is done by existing machines in a cafeteria or restaurant.

But because Dishcraft is only scrubbing the dishes, it only uses cold water and the brush to clean. The water acts as a lubricant for the brush to get all the gunk off. The machine doesn’t use any chemicals and the water can be recycled. By focusing solely on the cleaning of dishes, Dishcraft says it can provide a faster, more consistent cleaning experience with better ergonomics and less breakage.

Dishcraft is part of a larger push towards automation in the restaurant industry. Miso Robotics‘ Flippy cooks food, Bear Robotics‘ Penny expedites meals and busses tables, and restaurants like Creator and Spyce are built around their respective robots. It’s not hard to envision a future where all of these robots are brought together under one automated restaurant roof.

All this automation, however, does displace human workers, which creates its own set of societal issues. Dishcraft says its robot is filling a need right now because hiring and retaining dishwashers is actually a huge problem for restaurants, and if dishes don’t get washed, an entire restaurant grinds to a halt. Dishcraft Co-Founder and CEO Linda Pouliot told me by phone that using a robot for dishwashing can create a safer work environment for people because you eliminate things like slips on wet surfaces and hot water burns from overhead hoses spraying off dishes.

For restaurants or cafeterias in need of automating their dishwashing, Dishcraft offers two options. A Dishcraft robot can be leased and installed on-site, or they can use Dishcraft’s “dishes as a service.” This “DaaS” option works much like linen service, only with plates. Dishcraft drops off enough dishware for two days (or so) worth of service and then comes and collects the dirties to wash them off-site. Dishcraft is in pilots right now, and pricing was not disclosed.

Dishcraft has raised more than $25 million to date from investors including Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, and Lemnos. Pouliot spoke at our Articulate food robot conference earlier this year along with Miso Robotics’ CEO, Dave Zito about Building Towards Integrated Robot, Human Work Environments. You can watch the entire session here:

ArticulATE 2019: Building Towards Integrated Robot, Human Work Environments

Dominos Partners with Nuro for Driverless Pizza Delivery in Houston

Domino’s announced today that it has partnered with Nuro to deliver pizzas in the Houston, TX area via self-driving delivery vehicles. Select customers will be able to choose the “autonomous” option from participating stores later this year.

Nuro’s R2, which is a pod-like low-speed vehicle that’s about half the size of a normal car, is built for hauling goods (there is no space for a driver). Customers receiving their Domino’s order via one of Nuro’s vehicles will be able to track the progress of the vehicle through the Domino’s app and, once it arrives, use a PIN to unlock the cargo bay holding their pizza.

Since there is no driver for this type of delivery, it also means there is no one who will run the pizzas to the front door, so customers who opt for it will have to (shudder) walk to the curb. Of course, with no driver that also means there’s no need to tip.

Houston is becoming a hotbed of autonomous action for Nuro, which has also been running a self-driving grocery delivery pilot with Kroger in that city since March. There was also a report earlier this year that Nuro and Uber were talking about a food delivery partnership in Houston later this year, though there’s been nothing official announced yet. All in all, it looks like that $940 million investment from Softbank in February is really helping Nuro scale up.

This Nuro partnership also reinforces why we put Domino’s on our Food Tech 25 list this year. The pizza company has already started testing chatbots, in-car ordering and delivery to non-addressed locations (like a beach). With self-driving delivery, Domino’s is taking that further down its delivery stack.

EKIM Raises €10M for Autonomous Robot Pizza Restaurant, Rebrands as PAZZI

Given its rich culinary history, France might not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about autonomous restaurant chains, but French robot-pizza restaurant PAZZI (formerly known as EKIM) may change all that. Today PAZZI announced it has raised a €10 million (~$11.2M USD) Series A round of funding led Singaporean investment fund Qualgro. This brings the total amount raised by PAZZI €12.2M Euros (~$13.68M USD).

PAZZI creates small autonomous, robot-powered pizza restaurants. At roughly 45 square meters, the PAZZI concept is something between a large automated kiosk (like the Blendid robot) and full-on regular-sized restaurant. Shoppers order and customize their pizzas via touchscreen, which a three-armed robot makes, slides in and out of an oven, and slices — all without humans. According to this promotional video, PAZZI can make a pizza every 30 seconds.

Comment Pazzi réinvente la restauration ? [FORMAT 1MIN]

PAZZI is opening up its first location to the public in Montevrain, France on June 24, and the company told us in an email that the new money will “accelerate the development of its technology.”

We aren’t aware of too many other robot restaurants in France, but PAZZI is certainly not alone in launching an autonomous restaurant experiences. As we learned at our Articulate conference earlier this year, robots are good for repetitive (applying sauce and cheese to dough) and dangerous (working a hot oven) restaurant tasks.

Here in the U.S., robo-restaurants are starting to sprout up. Boston-based Spyce raised $21 million to expand its presence, Caliburger and Creator both have robots making burgers, and Cafe X and Briggo are broadening their robo-barista footprint. Over in China, Alibaba has Robot.he and the Haidilao hotpot chain wants to launch thousands of robot restaurants. (For more, check out our food robot market map!)

PAZZI seems to have equally large ambitions, and with its small footprint, and 24 hour capabilities, its robot seems perfect for malls, offices, airports and other high-traffic areas where speed is as important as taste.

With its new funding, we’ll see if PAZZI can scale its operations, without sacrificing any flavor.

Starship More Than Doubled its Robot Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

High school graduation happened last night in my town, which means in a matter of months, most of those kids will be heading off to college. And maybe, if they are lucky, they’ll be heading off to a college that has delivery robots.

As we’ve covered throughout the year, companies like Starship and Kiwi are bringing their li’l rover robots to college campuses like George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, UC Berkeley, Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. These delivery robots scurry about to bring hungry students snacks and meals.

At George Mason in particular, Starship’s robots are proving quite popular. According to an article yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education, George Mason has more than doubled it robot delivery fleet since January, adding 23 robots to the initial order of 20. And GMU is not stopping there: the university plans to add another 15 to the fleet in the fall.

That’s a lot of robots roaming about the quad.

In addition to adding more ‘bots, the popularity of robots also has the school imposing some limits. Starship told me during an interview earlier this year that though the robots could make deliveries 24/7, George Mason limits delivery hours so as not to interfere with students’ sleeping habits.

I used Kiwi’s robot delivery service at Berkeley earlier this year, and while it had its hiccups, the overall experience felt like living in the future. The ability to order food from your phone and have it delivered wherever you have on campus brings news levels of convenience that busy/lazy college students will quickly get used to.

To Infinite Acres and Beyond: Ocado Moves Into Indoor Farming, Robots Invade the Grocery Aisles

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While there are still plenty of questions around what exactly the future of indoor and alternative farming systems looks like, most will agree that tech will play a big role, as more companies look to tools like AI, predictive analytics, and other such programs to power their farms.

This is perhaps one reason UK-based tech company Ocado has decided to get in on indoor farming.

The company, known for its robot-powered grocery tech, joined existing indoor farming companies 80 Acres and Priva in announcing a new “turnkey” solution for indoor farming that will not only streamline much of the growing process through technology, but also leverage things like AI, automation and predictive analytics — tools Ocado employs regularly in its work with companies like Kroger. Together, the three have formed a new company, Infinite Acres, which looks to grow produce 24-7 in densely populated areas.

The idea is to get greens and other produce, like strawberries and bell peppers, to the store or the customer’s home the same day they are harvested. In that way, it makes sense to design indoor farms to live within cities, and Ocado has even said it eventually wants to co-locate these farms next to or near its customer fulfillment centers.

Ocado is known for its robot-powered smart warehouses, so will there be bots scurrying about between those rows of leafy greens? There’s no official word yet that will happen, but one can easily imagine a scenario where robots assist with harvesting the produce, then carry it to a nearby fulfillment center for packing and delivery.

Robo-Backlash Arrives at the Grocery Store
Robots in the workplace, though, have their downsides, and we saw a less enthusiastic response to them this week in a couple places.

As my colleague Chris Albrecht wrote yesterday, both Walmart and Ahold Delhaize have expanded their use of robots in stores. Unfortunately, not everyone loves the idea of encountering a bot in the cereal aisle. As Chris noted, at least initially, “the theory of robots being efficient helpers is running into some harsh realities.” Those include robots breaking down, robots freaking out customers, and in general making human employees feel more robotic than ever.

But are all these issues short term? “Some of these potential missteps in implementing robots could be because we are still in version 1.0 of this automation experiment, and there seems to be a mismatch between the customer expectations, robot design, and the tasks being handed over to robots,” Chris wrote. In theory, at least, those things might become non-issues when version 2.0 of these bots rolls around.

DoorDash Continues Its North American Takeover
Meanwhile, the onetime dark horse of third-party delivery, DoorDash, has expanded again, this time via the great bastion of suburban casual dining, Chili’s.

The two companies announced this morning they’ve inked an exclusive partnership to deliver Chili’s meals across the U.S. But it would seem that Chili’s decision to go with DoorDash (over, say Grubhub or Uber Eats) has less to do with suburbia and more to do with technology and DoorDash’s ability to seamlessly integrate its system with Chili’s existing POS, thus causing as little disruption as possible to existing operations.

As I wrote earlier today, “This ability to integrate almost seamlessly into existing restaurant systems may be key for third-party services in future as they rush to gain and retain customers.”

Whether that’s enough to help DoorDash grab the top spot in the third-party delivery market remains to be seen. And even if it were to, other events this week suggest there may soon be a new player in town that U.S. third-party delivery services have to contend with. This week, Amazon announced it’s closing down its Amazon Restaurants business — but that doesn’t mean the tech behemoth is washing its hands of the restaurant delivery game. Instead, it seems Amazon was at the same time part of a massive fundraise by UK-based Deliveroo. Which means Amazon may have shuttered its in-house restaurant-delivery business to focus time and money on expanding Deliveroo’s presence to this side of the Atlantic. It would also make an already competitive food-delivery market hotter than a basket of jalapeño-topped nachos from Chili’s.

Stay tuned,

Jenn

Now That They’re in Grocery Stores, Has the Robot Backlash Begun?

Both Walmart and Ahold Delhaize expanded their use of robots this year. However, according to two big news stories in less than a week, their entry into the workforce is off to a rocky start. Is the grocery industry in for a robo-backlash, and what that will mean for the automation in that sector?

In theory, robots are supposed to take over the manual and repetitive tasks, like taking inventory, scrubbing floors or spotting spills and messes. This, in turn, frees up humans for higher-level tasks and the time to engage in more customer service. To this end, in January, Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 Marty robots for its GIANT/MARTIN’S and Stop & Shop stores, and in April, Walmart expanded its use of in-store robots to 1,500 locations. But at least initially, the theory of robots being efficient helpers is running into some harsh realities.

Last Thursday, The Washington Post ran the story “As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines.” In it, The Post chronicled some of the issues the bots have been having in stores including breaking down, functioning erratically, freaking out shoppers and frustrating employees. As The Post writes, it seems like robots are creating the very problem they are supposed to be fixing:

But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues.

Then today, less than a week after The Post story, comes a story from The New Food Economy titled “Stop & Shop now has big, goofy-looking robots patrolling its aisles. What, exactly, is the goal?” It too, talked of its “Marty” robots malfunctioning, having limited functionality to begin with (something we noted at the time of the announcement), and creeping out customers (perhaps because Stop & Shop gave the robots giant googly eyes).

Some of these potential missteps in implementing robots could be because we are still in version 1.0 of this automation experiment, and there seems to be a mismatch between the customer expectations, robot design, and the tasks being handed over to robots.

The robots being used in the front of store (fulfillment robots in the back of house are a different story) are industrial looking. They are tall, cold and utilitarian in design, and move about in a very, well, robotic manner. Shoppers aren’t used to sharing aisles with an indifferent machine that is beaming a light to scan shelves for missing inventory or just watching the floor (with giant googly eyes) to see if anyone has made a mess. The Marty robot, we should note, doesn’t clean up any mess; it just stops and points them out for humans to deal with.

One has to wonder just how long-term these problems with robots will be. There’s a raft of startups looking to retrofit stores with banks of high-tech cameras in the ceiling to facilitate cashierless checkout. These cameras, aided by computer vision and machine learning, could easily take over spotting empty shelves and alerting staff about spills without the need for a robot roving the store. Walmart already debuted this type of invisible inventory management at its IRL store in NY in April.

This eye in the sky approach alleviates any creepy factor associated with bumping into a giant robot as you pick out a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, but it also has you shopping in a surveillance supermarket. As for employee issues, this is why Albertsons brings labor unions to the table at the very start of any automation discussion.

In addition to this being a story about busted robots, this is also a story about change. As the saying goes, the only thing people hate more than change is things staying the same. The way we shop for groceries is undergoing and will continue to undergo big changes in the coming year. Robots will be a part of that, and there will be problems that arise. It will be up to the retailers to figure out the right balance to avoid a robot-driven backlash.

Zippin Re-Launches its Cashierless Checkout Store in San Francisco

Zippin, one of the host of startups working on cashierless checkout, announced today that it was re-opening its San Francisco retail store.

The Zippin store, located at 215 Fremont Street, is akin to Amazon Go both in its bodega-like size and cashierless checkout technology. Zippin is also more like Amazon than other cashierless checkout technologies on the market in the way it uses a combination of both cameras and sensors to keep track of what people purchase.

Zippin opened its retail store in August of last year, but it was more of a working lab that was only open for limited hours. While Zippin operates this retail location, the company, like so many other cashierless startups, is looking to partner with existing retailers to retrofit their stores with checkout free technology.

I spoke with Zippin Founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri last week who explained that while his mission is the same as many other startups in the space, his company’s approach is different from the other startups vying to power the cashierless retail market. “Most others only use cameras,” said Motukuri, “We use cameras and sensors to increase accuracy.” Motukuri said that the problem with a camera-only solution is that they can be blocked by people and don’t provide enough accuracy, so Zippin uses weight sensors on shelves to augment what the cameras see.

Zippin is currently working with four major retailers, but wouldn’t disclose who they are. Motukuri said that his technology can scale up to any size store, but there is typically a cost hurdle as the price is proportional to the square footage of the store. As a result, Zippin’s partners are focusing on smaller stores right now.

For its retail partners, Zippin offers the option of either using the Zippin app or incorporating the Zippin technology into the retailer’s own app to facilitate entry and payment. In either implementation, customers scan their phone going into the store and overhead cameras will keep track of their movements and work in conjunction with the shelf sensors to know what they take. Once a shopper has everything, they just leave the store and the credit card is automatically charged. (Due to recent San Francisco regulations, Zippin does accept cash as well)

In addition to the cameras and sensors, Zippin also runs a number of edge computing modules so all the image processing is done locally in-store instead of sending it to the cloud. The means that the store does not need a big internet connection to function, and can still operate if the internet goes down.

Because it operates its own store, Zippin was able to learn some interesting things about the shopping experience it created. First was just how quick shopping trips became after people visited the store a couple of times. Motukuri said that at first, people were curious and would walk around for a bit. However, subsequent trips for shoppers would drop to ten seconds including purchase. (It should be noted that the store is only 250 sq. ft., so there’s not a lot of room to wander around in the first place.) Motukuri also said that because the experience was so fast, people were making multiple trips throughout the day; sometimes people were coming two and three times in the span of five minutes.

Founded in 2014, Zippin is headquartered in San Francisco and has raised $2.7 million in seed funding so far. That’s far less than crosstown rival Standard Cognition’s $51 million and Grabango’s $18 million. However, it’s still very early days in this space. Amazon Go is spurring retailers into action, so there is plenty of room for Zippin to zip up its own customers.

Podcast: Let’s Talk Restaurant Robots

As you might expect, putting a robot into the busy back of house of a fast food restaurant isn’t as easy as just setting it in front of the grill and plugging it in. That’s because restaurants are a complex mix of workflows, equipment and, yes, people, so automating a busy kitchen with robotics requires lots of planning.

For this podcast, we talk with two people building the future of restaurant robots: Shawn Lange, the head of Lab2Fab (a division of Middleby) and David Zito, the CEO of Miso Robotics (the company behind Flippy, the burger flipping robot).

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, downloading it directly or listening on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. Enjoy!

Build Your Own Home Robot Bartender for Under $300 with MyBar.io

We’re in the midst of planning a summer party at our house (the theme is yacht rock), and while I love throwing parties, I’m not a fan of the mess left after an evening of making cocktails. Between people sloppily pouring booze and mixers, it’s a sticky pain to clean up.

Which is why I’m tempted by Mybar.io DIY robot bartender. It’s basically a box that houses up to 9 pumps and tubes as well as some circuitry. You can order one for $299 if you build it yourself, or $399 if you order it fully assembled.

If you buy the kit, there’s an online guide to walk you through how to build it. Once set up, you download the app (Android only, because those tablets are cheaper), place the tubes in your selected bottles, and assign them to a pump via the app (e.g. vodka is pump one, orange juice is pump 2, etc.). Once you have all of your pumps labeled, the app takes stock of what booze and mixers you have and automatically generates a list of drinks you can make. Pick a drink and tap the button and the DIY Bar dispenses your cocktail.

I spoke with Mybar.io Founder Juan Pablo Risso, who told me that he is decidedly going after the DIY market right now. The company debuted the robot bartender at the Maker Faire last month in Portland, OR, and in keeping with that DIY spirit, everything about DIY Bar is open source. You can download the plans for the hardware and the circuit board, as well as the software and firmware from the company’s Github repository.

Right now, Mybar is a side gig for Risso, whose day job is working on IoT for Samsung. Mybar is bootstrapped and Risso said that he’s sold about 50 units since so far.

Risso and Co. are facing some stiff (drinks) competition in the home bartending appliance space. Bartesian (manufactured by Hamilton-Beach) is a Keurig-like countertop cocktail device that also sells for $299 (no assembly required). And on the higher end, Barsys offers a sleek drink making machine, but it will set you back more than $1,000. Which particular cocktail robot you want to buy probably depends on how much work you want to put into your machine, and how much flexibility you want in your mixology.

I just don’t want to spend all my time at my next party making drinks. Perhaps Mybar’s DIY robot is in my future.

Alexa Will Soon Book You Dinner and a Movie. What Will its Multi-Tasking Mean for Connected Kitchens?

At the company’s re:Mars conference yesterday, Amazon showed off a Alexa’s new multi-tasking functionality, which allows the virtual assistant to engage in more contextual interactions and commands.

Normally Alexa is a mono-tasking machine, which means you have to break up your requests into single items, all of which much start with your saying “Alexa.”

“Alexa, what time is the movie playing?”

“Alexa buy me tickets to the movie at 7:00.”

“Alexa, what restaurants are near the movie theater?”

But as discussed at re:Mars, soon Alexa will be able to collapse these multiple requests into more of a single, multi-part conversation. So when you buy your movie tickets, Alexa will then ask if you want to eat out nearby restaurant, make your reservation and even call you an Uber.

What immediately springs to my mind, however, is not having Alexa plan my date night, but how the virtual assistant’s new multitasking functionality could help in the kitchen. (Does that make me a bad husband?)

More than 100 million Alexa devices have been sold, and according to a January article on The Verge, there are “more than 150 products with Alexa built in, more than 28,000 smart home devices that work with Alexa made by more than 4,500 different manufacturers, and over 70,000 Alexa skills.”

Those products include kitchen devices big and small like LG appliances, GE microwaves, the June Oven, and even the Silo food storage system. Just like Alexa connecting movie tickets, dining and transportation, it should also be able to better connect various parts of your connected kitchen.

For example, you could ask Alexa for a lasagna recipe. Alexa could then check with the cameras in your connected fridge and your grocery purchase history to see if you have all the ingredients. If you’re missing something, it will be happy to order it for you same day delivery. Alexa could then ask what time you want to eat, set a reminder and pre-heat the oven at the appropriate time and show you a video on how to make the lasagna. After the lasagna reaches a certain cook time, Alexa could also turn on your June to cook a side.

The point is that thanks to yesterday’s news, all of these actions will be automatically coordinated via a single conversation with Alexa pushing some suggestions and contextually reacting to other requests.

The result of this multi-tasking Alexa will be a better guided cooking system that makes it more of a true assistant.