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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alexa

Orderscape Is Making Voice-Order Tech Ridiculously Simple for Restaurants

The restaurant industry has always been notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. But when it comes to voice-ordering tech, you can hardly blame them. As a concept, the idea of voice-enabling your menu — that is, making it possible to search for and order food from your restaurant via the likes of Google Assistant or Alexa — is unique and exciting. As a reality, however, restaurants have to develop and build out as another sales channel, voice is complex, expensive, and time-consuming — or in the words of Orderscape’s CEO, Michael Atkinson, “It’s overwhelming and God-awful.”

He should know. Having worked with restaurant tech for the last 14 years, Atkinson understands both the technical and operational challenges involved with bringing voice technology into restaurants. The hope is that Orderscape, which he founded in 2016 with Ted Cohn, will not just address some of these issues but also make it ridiculously simple for restaurants to add voice-enabled search and commerce as another sales channel — something that will become a competitive differentiator sooner than most of us think.

Orderscape makes a voice-ordering software layer that works with browsers, mobile phones and watches as well as smart speakers like Alexa. And as of last week, the company launched a large-scale voice-enabled search capability for around 50,000 menus on Google Assistant and Alexa. (Right now, it’s voice-only, with no display capability.)

To be clear, Orderscape isn’t actually in charge of creating or updating the menus. Rather, the company partners with restaurant platforms like Olo, Onosys, and Monkey Media, all of whom have been powering restaurants’ systems for years and are responsible for the content. “The way we work, our platform originates an order through voice. And then we use our algorithms to convert it from voice to digital, then we send those orders to our partners, who are connected to the restaurant POS,” Atkinson told me.

Orderscape also doesn’t take users to a specific restaurant, but instead tells users where their desired food item is available in their area. So, for example, telling Google Assistant, “I want a grilled cheese” will pull up relevant results at Denny’s as well as the local diner. From there, the customer can, according to Atkinson, “get more granular” and specify place, special instructions, etc.

But, as I said earlier, it’s complicated. Restaurant menus don’t automatically wind up on Google Assistant or Alexa. In fact, to activate a voice capability skill, a restaurant would have to create a voice user experience (VUI), a food-specific taxonomy (will it be called “pop” or “soda”?), then connect those elements to voice inputs, called “gateways,” like Alexa or Google.

With Orderscape, that work is already taken care of, which means a restaurant can get a menu voice-activated with zero disruption. There’s no installation, no training, no downtime. Orderscape simply gets permission from the restaurant to use its menu, ingests the information via an existing parter like Olo, and voice-enables the menu. “All the hard work has been done by portals and platforms,” says Atkinson.

This is potentially a huge selling point for Orderscape, and something that could go far in appeasing restaurants’ well-founded fears around adding yet-another technology to the mix. Right now, general managers are basically having to act as IT people for their restaurants. The appeal of Orderscape is that it may be a complex technology, but the restaurants won’t see that. As Atkinson says, “What we’ve done is try to take all the burden and hassle out of the restaurant side.”

Next up for Orderscape is to release a commerce version of its voice tech, which Atkinson says will drop towards the end of Q2 2019. This will mean users can not just search but also complete an entire transaction, right down to whether they want delivery or pickup, using Orderscape via Google Assistant. That whole image of being able to lie on your couch and shout instructions at a device, moving only to answer the door when the food arrives, is a fast-approaching reality.

Because of that, Atkinson’s quick to emphasize the need for restaurants to act now in terms of hopping the voice train. According to him, voice-enabled tech will explode over the next 12 to 18 months, and “2019 is the year everyone needs to get it together.”

This “getting it together” probably involves a little more than simply taking a phone call to grant Orderscape permission to ingest your menu. But not much, if my conversation with Atkinson is anything to go by. At the very least, it’ll be one less technology the GM has to grapple with during a busy dinner rush.

Gourmia to Roll Out Smart Multicooker, Coffee Brewer, and Dehydrator at CES

This year will be my first time at CES. Based off of what I’ve heard about the gigantic event, I’m expecting to discover new food tech startups, see new smart kitchen appliances in action, and get very sore feet.

I know at least one range of new products I’ll have to check out. Brooklyn-based smart kitchen company Gourmia just announced that it will be unveiling three new countertop appliances at CES: a 7-quart air fryer, which also functions as a rotisserie and dehyradrator; an 11-in-1 deluxe multicooker (similar to the Instant Pot); and a 10-cup coffee grinder and brewer.

All the devices are connected and can be controlled by the Gourmia mobile app, called Mia. They’re also compatible with Alexa or Google Home. Users can say either “Alexa, ask Mia,” or “Hey Google, ask Mia” to remotely manage cook times or change modes using their voice. The whole “asking a voice assistant to ask another service” thing is definitely annoying and might be more trouble than its worth when you could just do it on your phone, but hopefully Gourmia will find a way to get around it soon.

On the surface, none of these products seem particularly groundbreaking: after all, Gourmia’s lineup already features several IoT-enabled air fryers, multicookers and coffee grinder/brewers, which are already voice compatible. I’ll have to stop by their booth at CES to see if Gourmia’s newest appliances can sweep me off my (tired) feet.

Surprise! Amazon Says it Sold a Lot of Amazon Devices (and Instant Pots, too!)

Amazon put out a news release today touting its record-breaking holiday shopping weekend. And, in what will come as a shock to absolutely no one, the company said the best-selling products across all categories sold on Amazon.com were Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo Dot, which Amazon just happened to put on sale… on Amazon.

Get where we’re going with this?

The retail giant is always vague on details, and this release proved no exception, saying only that it was the “Biggest holiday shopping weekend ever for Echo devices, with millions sold worldwide—all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category.”

FWIW, last December, when Amazon released a similar batch of vague statistics, the company reported selling “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” worldwide over the entire 2017 holiday season.

OK, obviously Amazon releasing glowing stats about Amazon devices sold at a discount is a total corporate puffery, and I am complicit in writing about it. But, as vague as these stats may be, they are important to consider as more people adopt smart kitchen tech. Amazon’s Alexa is locked in a battle with Google Home to be your preferred voice ecosystem. Dominating voice control could in turn determine which kitchen appliances you buy, or impact where you buy your groceries.

Hardware startups, software developers and appliance makers alike want to align with a winner when it comes to incorporating new smart tech into their products. Amazon can create its own dominance by dint of controlling one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. Consider that at last count, Amazon had 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. That’s a huge user base to be potentially guided into buying an Amazon Echo device.

The more Echo devices are sold, the more people will want to use Alexa in their homes, which means more third-party support for even more devices and apps. The more third party devices and apps that incorporate Alexa means that Amazon is collecting even more of our data, which Amazon can then use to sell us more stuff, more of its own stuff (like groceries from Whole Foods) or even create more of its own devices like the Alexa microwave, which, now that we mention it, was not mentioned in the Amazon press release.

The point is, the more Amazon can flex its retail power, the more it can dominate the emerging world of smart assistants and voice control in our homes.

Alas, Alexa devices weren’t the only thing the company sold over the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping season. I throw this in here as just a bit of Amazon sales trivia, but Instant Pots continue to steamroll other kitchen appliances, with Amazon saying the Instant Pot DUO60 was also a top seller this past weekend. During the 2017 holiday season, the Instant Pot DUO80 was the top-selling kitchen item.

So take these numbers with the appropriate amount of salt, and be on the lookout for a release from Google touting its own Google Home Cyber Monday sales, followed by another holiday season recap from Amazon at the end of December.

Food Tech Roundup: CBD, Butterballs and Resy!

With Halloween in the rearview mirror and eggnog now on store shelves, we have officially entered the holiday season.

Dunh-dunh-DUNH!

Fear not, for we at The Spoon are here to help you with your connected cooking this season, whether that’s through cooking tips or… some supplemental help. Speaking of which…

The 411 (420?) on CBD
Derived from cannabis, CBD is all the rage and is being infused into everything from chocolates to beer to water and potentially even Coca-Cola products. Supposedly the wonder substance CBD can supposedly reduce inflammation and help with anxiety.

But does it, though? I mean, really? Or is it just another example of snake oil in a new package?

Vox has put together a pretty great primer on the state of CBD that you should read. Here’s a tasty nugg from that story to pique your interest “CBD is about as poorly regulated and understood as a product this popular can possibly be. It’s not accurate to say that CBD, as a whole, is bullshit. From a medical perspective, it’s promising; recreationally, it’s interesting. But that doesn’t mean the stuff you’re buying works.”

Alexa Adds Butterball Skill
Whether it’s your first or fiftieth time cooking turkey — there’s no shame in getting a little help when you need it. In a move fit for our digital age, in addition to its famous hotline, Butterball now has an Alexa skill to give you guidance with your bird.

As The Takeout writes, using Alexa connects you with an automated assistant to answer basic cooking questions by using just your voice. So your hands can be otherwise elbow-deep in a turkey, or filled with giblets and you can still get the answers you need.

RUMOR: Resy to Aquire Reserve
Eater reports that online reservation platform Resy is set to acquire rival table booker, Reserve for an undisclosed sum of money. The source of the rumor is Chicago restauranteur, Nick Kokonas (owner of Alinea) who also just happens to have his own reservation system called Tock. Kokonas also claims to have looked at a Reserve acquisition earlier this year, but passed on it. Both Resy and Reserve declined to comment.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Resy did indeed acquire Reserve. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Silo Comes Out of Stealth at the Smart Kitchen Summit

Today at the Smart Kitchen Summit, a new kitchen hardware company emerged from stealth mode. Silo makes a countertop vacuum-sealer system they claim will keep food fresh up to five times longer than your average plastic container.

The system consists of a vacuum base and a set of plastic containers, and integrates with Alexa. Founder Tal Lapidot first got the idea for Silo when he was looking for a better way to keep food fresh at home. Applying his engineering background to vacuum storage, he decided to try the technology on containers instead of plastic bags, which are single-use and less environmentally friendly.

“I wanted something fast and easy,” he told me. “Take a container of food, place it on something, and get it vacuum sealed with one touch.”

Since the product he wanted didn’t exist yet, he decided to invent it. Lapidot filed a patent for his technology, and in 2016 he quit his job to pursue Silo full-time.

From the beginning, he knew he needed to make his product smart. “Many of us don’t remember what food we put in the fridge one week ago,” said Lapidot. “The device can give you a stamp of approval that that food is still good… It’s the missing piece.”

Originally, Silo used an app to track food freshness. But users didn’t always have their phones when cooking, and there’s also the whole “sticky fingers in the kitchen” issue. To solve that, the company decided to turn to voice.

Users tell Alexa what food they’re storing with their Silo and the technology will track how long that food lasts. If you ask Alexa what you have on hand for dinner, it will list off what items in your fridge are ready for cooking. You can also ask it about the state of specific foods.

According to Lapidot, Silo is the first company to make a device that has Alexa built in, which means that there’s a fully enabled Alexa Dot in the base of the device. Not only can Silo vacuum seal your food, it can also read you the news, dictate a recipe, or play some tunes.

The company will launch its Kickstarter campaign on October 16. Lapidot said he couldn’t yet disclose prices, but told us that backers could purchase the Silo vacuum seal device plus bundles of containers.

Silo turned to Kickstarter to source funds because the product attracts early adapters. “We want to make waves,” said Lapidot. They’re planning to ship by Q3 of 2019.

As we know all too well at The Spoon, crowdfunded kitchen appliances can have a tricky time making the leap from concept to shipment. Lapidot, however, is confident that won’t be an issue for his company. “Many times, hardware companies work very hard developing a prototype, but they don’t always understand the realities of manufacturability,” he said.

Silo already has two manufacturing partners, one of which is the largest manufacturer of food-grade plastics in China. Many on their team also hail from the manufacturing sector, so they understand potential pitfalls and can avoid them.

Keep checking in for more news from the Smart Kitchen Summit: new products, platforms, updates, and more!

Podcast: Let’s Talk About That Alexa-Powered Microwave

In this special episode of the Smart Kitchen Show, Chris Albrecht and I catch up with our good friend Stacey Higginbotham of the IoT Podcast to talk about the big Amazon Alexa devices event in Seattle today.

Stacey was on hand as Amazon unveiled a slate of new devices, including an Alexa powered microwave and the second generation Echo Show, so listen in as we discuss what it all means for Amazon and the smart home market.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, downloading it to your machine or subscribing in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player.

Report: Amazon to Release an Alexa Microwave?

According to a CNBC report, Amazon plans on releasing at least eight new Alexa powered devices by the end of year, including a microwave oven.

If true, it would mark a turn in Amazon’s strategy and move the company further up the stack and into creating a more end-to-end hardware solution. In addition to embedding Alexa into everyone else’s appliance, it would start making its own.

CNBC writes that this would be Amazon’s first move into home appliances. While it would be the first one to actually hit the market if true, we know that Amazon has at least been thinking about its own smart refrigerator. So the company making its own microwave isn’t that much of a stretch.

Amazon has made similar vertically-stacked hardware plays over the past year with the acquisition of Blink’s connected cameras and Ring, which makes a smart doorbell.

Without any more information, it’s hard to tell whether an Alexa powered microwave would be a good thing for consumers. GE recently came out with an Alexa-enabled microwave that lets you control it with your voice. But microwaves are pretty surgical appliances. You set the time to cook, usually for short bursts numbering in seconds and minutes, and the device shuts itself off afterwards. I don’t see a lot of need to bark orders at it.

What an Alexa-powered microwave would do, however, is start to shut Google and its voice assistant out of your smart home equation. If Amazon can sell you a cheap enough microwave through its massive retail platform, it gains a foothold into your kitchen that Google can’t get to. And if the Alexa microwave has the same scan-to-cook technology as the GE microwave, Amazon would know what you’re cooking and when, and oh hey! Why don’t we have Whole Foods deliver that frozen meal to you as well. It’s not a big leap in logic to think if an Alexa microwave sold well, it could expand into more Alexa appliances that all talk to each other (and you) but not to Google — denying the search giant all that juicy user data.

In addition to the microwave, Amazon is supposedly working on an amplifier, a receiver, a subwoofer and an “in-car gadget.”

Richard Blais is a Big Believer in Voice Interfaces

The way we interact with our kitchens is in the midst of massive changes. Guided cooking apps are helping anyone become a better cook, screens are popping up on fridges (and elsewhere), and we can control more and more appliances in the kitchen just by talking to them.

It’s this voice control that celebrity chef Richard Blais thinks will revolutionize the kitchen. In a Q&A with Uproxx, Blais said:

So, as a big tech guy and start-up enthusiast, I think we are right here — not that we have any of this technology right now, but voice activated everything I believe is — first of all, it’s already in some homes… But I think that where the commercial restaurant or kitchen very shortly will be able to see some really amazing things happen, from the business perspective as well as the cooking execution.

If I could walk into my kitchen right now, like I can in my home, and set an oven, and a fryer and a refrigerator temperature by just saying, “Hey oven, turn on to 500 degrees and set the fryer to this and turn the lights on to this.”

We often write about voice interfaces in the home kitchen. GE’s new microwave is Alexa-enabled so you can tell it to stop or add time to your cooking. You can control LG’s SmartThinq line of cooktops ovens and fridges with Alexa or Google Home. And Kohler and Delta both have voice controlled faucets that let you dispense precise amounts of water.

These are all applications for home kitchens, however, which usually are less loud and chaotic environments than a commercial kitchen. Chef Blais would know better than I, so I wonder what tweaks would need to be made in a restaurant kitchen to accommodate for noise levels, voice recognition and lag time reduction between when a command is given and when the appliance executes it.

Thankfully, we will have a chance to ask Chef Blais in person, as he will be a speaker at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October (get your tickets now!). He’s enthusiastic about technology so the discussion with him is sure to be insightful and entertaining.

Could Alexa in Hotel Rooms Boost Amazon’s Restaurant Delivery Biz?

My wife is a frequent business traveler, and before I could even finish asking her if she’d like Alexa in her hotel room, she answered “Hell yeah.” Evidently, her first impulse upon walking into her hotel room is to ask Alexa what time it is, and what the weather will be the next day. If she could order up room service — she’d be all set.

So it appears that Amazon is on to something with its new Alexa for Hospitality program. Amazon’s virtual assistant will be available this summer in select Marriott, Westin, and St. Regis hotels, among others.

Alexa enabled rooms will allow guests to play music, find local businesses, order room service, contact housecleaning, call the front desk, check out and more all by just asking. Amazon says that soon guests will be able to connect their own Alexa accounts so they can call contacts, access personal music and listen to their audiobooks.

Hanging over all this is whether you want an always-listening device in your hotel room. And that is a legitimate concern, but here at The Spoon, we’re most interested in the eating part of Alexa for Hospitality and where that will go.

At its most basic, the ability to order room service through Alexa is pretty cool! And this could be an easy way for hotels to increase the amount of money guests spend on food. Each time a guest walks into a room or wakes up or asks Alexa a question is an opportunity for the hotel to advertise a happy hour, wine tasting or other experience that involves spending money.

There’s also an opportunity to upsell guests as they order room service (“Would you like to add a glass of wine with that?”) And while the data hotels collect from Alexa will be anonymized and aggregated, creating an Alexa skill tied to loyalty or rewards programs could yield even more opportunities for personalization when you can connect your account to the hotel Echo.

As with most things with Amazon, Alexa for Hospitality isn’t just about selling a bunch of devices to hotels. It’s about broadening Amazon’s ecosystem to get you to use more of its services.

So consider what Alexa devices in hotel rooms could do for Amazon’s restaurant delivery business. You could ask Alexa for a local Thai restaurant recommendation, and have that food delivered to your door.

This assumes, of course, that hotels allow that type of functionality. They may be inclined to block food ordering from outside restaurants and drive you to the hotel eatery’s $25 cheeseburger.

But money talks, yadda yadda, if Amazon figured out a way for the hotel to wet their beak on the outside delivery transaction, management could probably find a way to make it happen. In fact, funneling all of the guests through Alexa to order food from the outside could ensure that the hotel gets a cut of every transaction instead of missing out as people just order food on their own through Grubhub or UberEats or Dominoes.

Given the popularity of virtual assistants, I wouldn’t be surprised if they became as standard as mini-bars in hotel rooms. With the ability to add skills that increase revenue and choice for the guests? That could have everyone saying “hell yeah.”

WePlenish Launches Kickstarter For Amazon Dash-Powered Grocery Reordering Container

You know that searing anger and frustration you feel when you think you have one more coffee pod (or energy bar, or teabag) left, but instead you’re greeted with an empty container? Meaning you either have to a) do without, or b) hightail it to the store and hope you’re not late for work?

WePlenish wants to make sure that terrible experience never happens to you again. The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based startup has developed an IoT-enabled container which uses sensors and WiFi to automatically reorder pantry staples through an integration with Amazon’s Dash Replenishment service platform. Yesterday they launched a Kickstarter to try and raise $50,000 for their minimum viable product (MVP), dubbed ‘the Java Smart Container.’

When you receive a smart container, you’ll download the WePlenish app and enter in your chosen product for the container — anything from K-cups to snack bars is fair game. WePlenish then uses their patent-pending volume measuring technology to keep track of how full the container is at all times.

When the supply drops below 25%, they send you a Push notification to make sure they’re good to go ahead and reorder. At this point, you have a choice to stop the order or add extra items to your delivery.

As you use it, the smart containers also use a Nest-like algorithm to learn your consumption patterns. But WePlenish does have safety nets in place, so they can trigger an order even if you have relatives in town who are depleting your coffee supply at a much faster rate than normal.

So are WePlenish’s smart containers that much more useful or efficient than other grocery reordering methods? Using Amazon Dash buttons and voice assistants is easy, sure — but you still have to do something. “They require the user to take action, to remember to place the order,” WePlenish co-founder Ro Grosman told The Spoon. The Java Smart Container takes you out of the equation entirely.

“We believe that the smart home technology should work for you. The automation should be seamless,” said Grosman. Which means, if their product works well enough, customers won’t have to think about it at all. “We want people to almost forget about it and let it order for them,” he emphasized. 

Of course, seamless automated ordering is what Amazon had in mind with their integrated, in-device replenishment platform.  The question is — for WePlenish and Amazon’s Dash platform — do you need an IoT-powered device to reorder for you, or would it be better to simply create a “subscription” through Amazon or other providers to ship to you on the regular (Amazon being Amazon, they have both bases covered).

Some will remember WePlenish from a 2016 Amazon announcement about a new crop of Dash Replenishment Service partners. The company was one of a handful of companies that Amazon had signed up to integrate Dash, and while Amazon has since put much of its focus in the intervening time period on voice ordering with the runaway success of Alexa, there are companies like WePlenish still pushing forward with Amazon’s integrated re-ordering platform.

WePlenish is Grosman’s second startup. Prior to WePlenish, Grosman founded a company called GoDataFeed in 2007, which is an ecommerce multichannel marketing platform. He still serves as executive chairmen. WePlenish and GoDataFeed are closely tied through a technology backend as well as through some employees; according to Grosman, he started WePlenish with a few GoDataFeed employees and has since grown the newer company to about 20 employees.

WePlenish isn’t the only food tech startup edging in on the grocery replenishment space. British company Pantri (finalist in the Smart Kitchen Europe startup showcase) is developing a maker platform to connect smart appliances with grocery delivery companies, and PantryChic (a SKS 2015 Startup Showcase veteran) has a patented system which stores, dispenses, and reorders dry pantry goods like flour and sugar.

Despite the name of their inaugural product, Grosman says they anticipate that their containers will be used for a lot more than just coffee. “Our goal is to moderate the entire pantry,” he said — and beyond. Grosman told The Spoon that WePlenish plans to eventually offer in-fridge grocery ordering. 

The Java Smart Container, which has already entered into production (a good sign for those leery of Kickstarter hardware fails), will be available on Amazon this fall for $39.99, but early backers can snag one for $20 through Kickstarter. According to Grosman, WePlenish has about twenty total employees and is largely self-funded, but he did say the company has taken an undisclosed amount of private investment.

Silent Hack Could Send Malicious Instructions to Virtual Assistants

As virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri become more popular, so too will they become a more popular target for hackers. The New York Times reports that researchers in China and the U.S. have discovered a way to surreptitiously activate and command those virtual assistants by broadcasting instructions that are inaudible to the human ear.

From that NYT story:

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

Hackers might not care about your shopping list, but considering 41.4 percent of smart speakers are in the kitchen, it’s important to consider whether they could be used to turn on an oven while you’re out, or secretly start up a video call.

You should read the full Times article for a nice dive into the world of AI, speech recognition and modern hacking techniques. For our purposes here at The Spoon, these security notices are good to be aware of as companies look to use food as a way to get further into — and control more parts of — our homes.

Consider that Amazon, which is behind Alexa, wants to use a series of connected locks and cameras to allow deliveries into your home or car while you’re not there. Or that Google just this week announced more native control over kitchen appliances and a strikingly human sounding AI that can make calls on your behalf to set up appointments. And shortly after launching last year, a WiFi exploit created a security hole in Amazon Key’s connected camera setup.

Now before you toss your Echo into the ocean, you should know that there’s no evidence that this type of attack has ever happened outside the lab. But that won’t stop hackers from trying and improving their techniques.

The point is that it will obviously be incumbent upon companies to be as proactive and transparent as possible in determining and thwarting these type of attacks. But if we as consumers want to turn over more control over our lives to these virtual assistants, then it’s up to us as well to stay vigilant and educated about the new threats their use brings.

Amazon’s Reported Robot Probably Won’t Just be a Mobile Alexa

News reports surfaced today that Amazon may be working on it’s own robot. According to Bloomberg, the retail giant has been working on a project codenamed “Vesta”(the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family) and is being run out of Amazon’s Lab126 hardware R&D division, which came up with the Echo and Fire line of tablets and set-top boxes.

Sources tell Bloomberg that Vesta would be like a mobile Alexa, that follows people around. Vesta could also autonomously travel around a home using high end cameras and computer vision. Vesta could potentially be in home tests later this year and available for purchase in 2019.

Like with any futuristic news of this sort, it must be taken with a few grains of salt. I’ve no doubt that Amazon is working on a home robot, because Amazon is working on everything. But the idea that it will be a general mobile Alexa seems counterintuitive based on how Amazon normally works and how much the company believes in efficiency.

Let’s start with Alexa itself, the company’s voice controlled smart assistant. With Echo Dots being so cheap, it is much easier to outfit an entire house with a dozen of those small smart pucks than wait for a robot to follow you around to answer your questions or set a timer. Not to mention how much of an impediment stairs would be.

Additionally, as we’ve seen from patent filings and recent purchases, Amazon is looking at embedding itself deeper and more directly into devices. It’s at least exploring a smart fridge that can sniff out bad food, and a high-tech garden device that can see what types of food you are growing.

The company also recently purchased Blink, which made cloud-connected cameras, and Ring, maker of the connected doorbell. The Blink acquisition actually came with computer vision chip technology that the the company had developed. This type of computer vision could be used to help a robot navigate around couches, but more likely it could be shrunk down so you can put smart cameras in fridges and pantries to help you with household inventory management.

On top of all that, Alexa is being embedded into appliances like the LG SmartThinq line of refrigerators and ovens. This type of integration will enable more guided cooking — Alexa picks out a recipe based on what you have in your fridge and will tell the oven to preheat. In a kitchen this type of ethereal help seems more efficient than a small robot scurrying around to grab your parsley (not to mention running around your house brandishing a butcher knife).

Having said all that! I’m sure Bezos and Co. are working on a robot. In fact, last year Amazon received a patent for techniques for mobile device charging using robotics. My guess is whatever shape this robot takes will not just be another version of Alexa, but will surprise use with an entirely new use case.