Looking for a new smart fridge? Samsung’s got you covered and this time they’re bring Alexa with them.
Today the company announced the sixth generation of their flagship smart fridge, the Family Hub. The first of the big changes with the latest version of Family Hub is the addition of Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Samsung, which has long pushed its own voice assistant in Bixby, looks like it’s finally recognizing that the dust has settled in the voice assistant battle and Alexa is the dominant platform. That said, it looks like the company hasn’t given up on Bixby just yet, as it is giving users the choice of using Alexa or Bixby.
The other addition of what they are calling the SmartThings Cooking service. Many of the meal-planning features in the cooking service had been made available in the previous versions of the Family Hub, but in January at virtual CES the company had announced an expanded set of capabilities such as guided cooking and the ability to send cooking instructions to synced cooking appliances like the company’s Slide-In range. With the new upgrade, users of the Family Hub will be able to access all of these features from the Family Hub screen. The SmartThings Cooking service is powered by the Whisk platform.
If you’re a chicken lover, we’ve also got some good news in the Family Hub’s newest food shopping partner: Perdue Farms. In the announcement Samsung said they have added the chicken and premium meats-by-mail provider to their integration partner list.
You got to give Samsung credit: Despite early reviews mocking what some called a Frankenfridge, the company has stuck to its vision of building a smart fridge platform and updating it every year. Six generations in, one would assume that the Family Hub line of fridges is selling well, but the reality is we don’t know since the company doesn’t make sales numbers available. We can make some assumptions, though, based on looking at the number of reviews for SKUs like the 27″ French door edition, which is garnering enough reviews at Home Depot (1664 reviews) and Best Buy (433 reviews) that make it look as if it’s selling as well as other Samsung top models.
Owners of previous generation Family Hubs may be wondering if they will be able to get in on the Alexa and upgraded Smart Things cooking capabilities. According to a Samsung spokesperson, any Samsung Family Hub with generation 2 software or higher can be upgraded to generation 6 software.
The announcement didn’t say when the models will be in stores, but if the past rollouts of the Smart Hub are any indication, I’d expect them in stores this fall.
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