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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon Echo

Amazon’s Echo Show 10 Swivels to Follow You. That Might be Useful in the Kitchen

Amazon introduced the latest version of its Echo Show at its hardware event today. The new Echo Show 10 features the usual Alexa-powered smart assistant, screen and speakers, but includes one new feature that might be particularly useful in the kitchen: it rotates to follow you around.

Think about how you move around when cooking from a recipe. You shift between your prep area to the fridge to the oven to pantry. Being able to always have the recipe in view means no problem if you forget what temperature to set the oven or how many eggs you need to grab.

Even if you aren’t following an on-screen recipe, the ability for the screen to swing around so you can watch a show as you cook or hold a video call is pretty neat.

We haven’t had a chance to play around with the Echo Show 10 yet, so it may not work all that well in reality. And not everyone will be comfortable with an Amazon device watching you and silently following you around with its camera eye.

But, if you’ve already given in and have an Alexa powered assistant, this seems like it could give you a little more mobility and utility. I mean, it doesn’t seem as strange as the indoor drone Amazon also announced today that pops up and flies around your house acting as a security camera.

The new Echo Show 10 will cost $249.99, will be available in Charcoal and Glacier White. Amazon says it will ship in time for the holidays.

Google’s Not-So-Secret Weapon in the Virtual Assistant Wars: Photos

If the kitchen is the heart of the home, then Google, not Amazon has the upper hand when it comes to building the smart kitchen assistant of choice. The secret weapon of the Google Home Hub isn’t a smarter AI, or better sound quality (it’s definitely not that), it’s pictures.

To understand why pictures are so important to winning in the smart assistant space, think of the iconic Kodak pitch scene in Mad Men. In it, Don Draper explains that the 1960s slide projector didn’t have a “wheel” as the executives described it, but rather a nostalgic carousel.

Mad Men - The Carousel (Higher Quality)

While it was far less dramatic (and fewer cigarettes were smoked), my wife recently explained that she had formed an “emotional connection” with the Google Home Hub, Google’s smart display. This immediately caught my attention because she was more frustrated than anything by Amazon’s Echo Show, but she genuinely loves Google Home Hub. That’s because it is a kind of time machine. Google Home Hub can access the thousands of pictures stored in my Google Photos account. Any time she’s in the kitchen, she sees a picture of our son’s fifth birthday party, or the moment he lost a tooth, or a vacation picture, and it makes her happy.

Google Home Hub is her (and my) carousel, and this type of emotional connection will only get stronger as we get older and the photos from today resurface years from now. We actually demoted our Echo Show to the living room even though we listen to a ton of music and the sound quality of the Home Hub is way worse. Being able to see our photos was more important than the fidelity of Steely Dan’s Aja.

Alexa cannot access my photos and I have no plans to store them on Amazon. I’m pretty deep in the Google Photo ecosystem and I’m not alone. As of May 2017, Google Photos had 500 million users. They make it so easy to upload from your phone that it’s hard to envision a scenario where I switch to Amazon Photos just so I could see them on an Echo Show.

But this isn’t just about warm and fuzzy feelings. There is big money at stake.

As my colleague Mike Wolf has written, kitchen screens are going to be a big deal. The combination of voice control and visuals allow you to quickly find out information, plan your day, access video entertainment, and even help guide you while you cook.

On a very base level, there are billions of dollars at stake from the device sales alone. Strategy Analytics reports that more than 12 million homes will own a smart display by the end of this year, and that number will jump to 100 million homes by 2023. Whoever can grab more marketshare, obviously, makes more direct sales money.

Then of course there is the additional revenue generating opportunity from photo storage. I’ve paid Google two bucks a month for four years for that privledge, and don’t see a time when I’ll stop (hopefully they won’t kill it).

And because we live in the times we do, dominant smart assistants also get access to all that data we generate by asking it questions, controlling our smart devices and playing us songs and videos. That data, in turn, helps perpetuate whomever’s dominance. Right now, Alexa is king in the smart speaker space, but its lead is slipping as Google gains marketshare.

Whoever dominates in the smart assistant space also helps shape the future of the connected kitchen as appliance makers look to incorporate new technologies that have a proven user base. Google was everywhere at CES last week, and more appliance makers are highlighting Google Home integration. GE Appliances showed off its mega Kitchen Hub 27 inch video touchscreen that mounts above your oven. It runs on Android and the company highlighted its Google Assistant integration. Elsewhere, KitchenAid joined other manufacturers like JBL and Lenovo in launching its own Google-powered smart display.

The smart assistant is the tip of the spear to accessing and controlling more of your future smart home. Though the battle has just begun, in the smart assistant arms race between Google and Amazon, it’s not necessarily the brains of the device that will prove to be the winner, but the one that wins over our hearts.

3 Tips to Avoid Failure, from the Man behind Juicero and Amazon Echo

In the hardware startup world, the margin between success and failure can be razor-thin. Malachy Moynihan knows a thing or two about both: He was the Chief Product Officer at infamous kitchen hardware startup Juicero, and also led the charge for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit yesterday, he sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman to talk about why some tech products succeed — and why others become a cautionary tale.

So how did Juicero go from a startup darling with $120 million in funds to, in Moynihan’s words, “the poster child for Silicon Valley excess and VC ineptitude?” The infamous Bloomberg story may have been the nail in the Juicero coffin, but according to Moynihan there were significant hurdles much earlier. Getting 20 packs of cold-pressed juice to customers every week is a very expensive process that doesn’t have an efficient supply chain in place. “The logistics just don’t scale,” explained Moynihan, which other companies (such as meal kits) are struggling with to this day.

“We should have stayed in the commercial space,” said Moynihan. “We really went after a fully branded experience… with lots of money spent on Facebook doing influencing.”

Moynihan finished with three takeaways for new hardware startups:

Always think about your consumer first.
“If there’s one lesson I learned from Amazon, it’s to always think first about the customer, said Moynihan. To make a successful product, you have to engineer a perfect consumer experience with the minimal amount of friction. Take the Amazon Echo: It cuts out the step of typing on a phone or computer, and reduces the amount of appliances you need on hand.

The first product doesn’t have to be perfect.
“Think very very deeply about the really critical features that you have to have — and the ones that would be nice to have,” said Moynihan. You don’t have to get everything into the first iteration of your product; patience is key. Patience for failure, patience for roadblocks, and patience for consumer acceptance. “The path to a lot of these products is: ‘It won’t work it won’t work it won’t work — oh my God, it worked!” said Moynihan.

Cultivate the press.
That last one may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s important nonetheless. Good press is critical to the success of any product — especially a consumer-facing hardware one.

Look out for more posts on the panels, companies, and news from the fourth Smart Kitchen Summit!

 

Sonos gets Alexa (and soon Google and Siri)

If you’re like me, Amazon’s Echo plays a central role in your kitchen. Player of music, answerer of questions, setter of timers, forecaster of weather. The Echo is super convenient, but the sound quality is definitely lacking.

Since it was announced last year, I’ve eagerly anticipated the marriage of Alexa’s voice control with the room-filling sound of Sonos Play speakers. Today, Sonos announced that Alexa integration is finally here, along with a new Sonos One speaker with Alexa built in — as well as forthcoming Google Assistant and Siri support.

For existing Sonos and Alexa owners, the Amazon connected assistant is available via a Sonos app beta update available today. With it, you’ll be able to control your Sonos speakers with your voice via the Echo and Echo Dot.

With the Sonos One (available October 24), Sonos is vying to become Switzerland of connected home assistants. The $199 speaker sports Alex integration out of the box, with support for Google Assistant and Siri (via iOS) coming in 2018.

This is probably the best position for Sonos to take as it feels the squeeze between cumbersome traditional high-end audio and the more convenient but lower fidelity smart home devices like the Echo. The timing is good too, given that today Google unveiled its beefy Google Home Max smart speaker and the upcoming Apple Homepod bills itself as having superior audio. Being agnostic to your assistant ecosystem of choice could give Sonos an edge and a chance to regain some lustre.

We had three Sonos speakers in our house, and almost immediately stopped using all of them once we got an Amazon Echo. Despite having worse sound, the device was in the kitchen, so it was more convenient to where our family mostly congregates. It’s such a high-class problem, but after experiencing Alexa’s voice control, running to get my phone to control my speaker felt like so much… work.

But was we played more music in the kitchen — whether to cook to, do homework by, or just throw an impromptu dance party — sound quality became more important. My pre-Sonos One solution was to plug an Echo Dot into a Sonos Play:5, but that takes up a lot of counter space, has dangling cords and can make it harder for Alexa to hear my voice. With its smaller footprint and newer technology, the Sonos One becomes an interesting proposition.

Chefling Is The Smart Kitchen Personal Assistant You Never Knew You Needed

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Created in 2016 by a group of Northwestern University grads, the Chefling app was designed to be the ultimate smart kitchen assistant. The app, available on both Android and iPhone aims to resemble life spent in the kitchen of an average family and comes with three main features: a home inventory management system that syncs across devices, a colorful shopping list and a smart cookbook that suggests recipes based on available ingredients.

The home inventory management system monitors what a user buys and then keeps an eye on freshness levels, based on purchases. It also syncs across every family member’s device so any quick trips to the grocery store are simplified. The shopping list feature allows users to organize and create a list that is not only easy to browse, but easy to share. The cookbook feature browses a user’s inventory using an algorithm that calculates recipe matches based on what is in the pantry.

Chefling also has Amazon Echo and Google Home skills so users can operate the app hands-free through voice control.

Chefling’s long-term goal is to bring the platform outside of the phone and into smart fridges, as well as incorporating advanced A.I. elements and image recognition technology to create an assistant that is truly integrated with the home kitchen.

Learn more about Chefling at http://www.chefling.net/.

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Klove Offers Low-Cost Entry Point To The Smart Kitchen

The current state of the smart kitchen is still, well, kind of expensive. And that’s ok – markets in their early days often produce products with high price tags as demand is still being developed and solutions still being realized. Intelligent ovens, smart fridges, connected tea infusers – it all sounds like an amazing eutopia of high tech deliciousness. But these solutions aren’t making cooking easier for the masses – at least not yet. But some areas of the smart kitchen are starting to produce at mainstream prices – most specifically in the sous vide space with sub $100 machines available at big box retailers like Target.

And then there are startups like Klove. The concept behind the Klove stove top knob is pretty cool – it’s a retrofit device that replaces your dumb stove knobs and adds a pretty crazy amount of intelligence into a little form factor.

The Klove smart knob acts as an entry-level guided cooking system – assessing the state of heat on whatever dish you’re preparing and letting you know when to adjust and when you can walk away. Klove comes with a host of recipes to start with, so you don’t have to guess what to cook when you get started.

Klove -Just Talk and cook

With a companion app (because of course) and Google Home / Amazon Echo compatibility, the Klove smart knob also has some machine learning baked in and will adjust recipes based on your preferences over time. Sure it might say to scramble eggs for 5-7 minutes, but maybe you like yours runny. The knob will learn that over time and adjust its alerts accordingly. Like a little digital sous chef who remembers your favorite type of pancake. (Chocolate chip. It’s always chocolate chip.)

There’s even a safety feature built into the device. Try to leave home with your stove on – the Klove app will alert you before you get out the door, ending the days of wondering “did I leave my stove on?” when you get to work. It will also alert you if you walk away from the stove for a minute or two and are needed to turn something up or down. If you’ve ever cooked something too long – or had boiled water overflow and spill onto the stove top, you’ll probably find this feature helpful.

The best part is that Klove is only $29. Well, for now – it’s available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $29 which is technically a price drop from the company’s first unsuccessful crowd funding campaign. But there seems to be some momentum this time around and the sub $40 price point is pretty attractive. If voice control is driving more interest in connected tech in the home, retrofit devices like Klove can help consumers see the value of technology to assist them in cooking better and easier at home.

Klove has had some momentum recently, having raised $250k from investors in a SEED round of funding and being named “The Next Big Thing” in food tech via the Nestle “Next Big Thing” startup competition in London. Klove isn’t the first company to create a retrofit smart knob for stoves – Meld introduced its smart knob in 2015 and went a step further than Klove to be able to automatically control the temperature during cooking as opposed to notifying someone to turn the dial up or down when ready. Meld ended up cancelling its Kickstarter when it was acquired by Meyer Corp (owner of guided cooking brand Hestan Cue) after the campaign was successfully funded. Hestan took the learning and knowledge behind the Meld knob and used it to build its current guided cooking platform – though the actual knob form factor never resurfaced.

Klove has about 4 weeks left to raise the initial $20k to get started on development – and with a few smart knob competitors in the space, it will be interesting to see how they do. For now, you can grab a Klove for $29 as an early bird backer and expect to see the smart knob right around Christmas.

Samsung Adds Bixby AI To Family Hub Fridges

When Samsung debuted Bixby, its AI-enabled home assistant on Galaxy S8 phones, we wondered how well it would do as an Amazon Echo or Google Home competitor. After all, carrying your phone from room to room to control your smart home with voice makes about as much sense as….carrying your phone room to room to control your smart home with an app.

But it didn’t take Samsung long to take Bixby out of the phone and put it in some of its existing smart appliances – namely, the mother of all smart appliances, the Samsung Family Hub 2.0.

The Family Hub debuted at CES several years ago, with a giant touchscreen interface on the front and all kinds of interesting kitchen functions, including grocery ordering and to-do lists for family members. But Samsung clearly had plans to use the technology they were building inside these fridges as more than just glorified tablets.

On Sunday, Samsung announced it will include Bixby’s AI functionality inside Family Hub fridges, allowing users to search for recipes and ask Bixby for news and weather – very similar to competitive AI-powered speakers. But the Family Hub also allows for food ordering through partners such as Nomiku (sous vide company making sous vide-ready meal kits) and Grubhub and with the native voice functions paired with the touchscreen, along with possible connectivity to Samsung’s other smart devices in the home, it makes for an interesting voice solution in the kitchen. Samsung recently invested in Nomiku as they launched their RFID meal kits and laid out clear plans to form a cohesive ecosystem in the kitchen.

According to Pulse News in Korea,

“Bixby’s deep learning will enable the fridge to control temperature automatically, call up recipes based on user’s eating habits or recommend favorite music.”

Samsung recently invested in Nomiku as they launched their RFID meal kits and laid out clear plans to form a cohesive ecosystem in the kitchen. From Mike’s piece on the investment and news, “Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings….However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had previously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.”

Current Family Hub users can also get upgraded to include Bixby functionality inside their fridges through a software update – a nice feature for a pricey appliance that we’ve often wondered how appliance giants plan to support with new functionality coming out regularly.

The install of Bixby has just begun and the updates aren’t rolled out yet. But soon, the voice in the kitchen might be your fridge telling you what’s for dinner.

Here’s Why The Echo Show Is Amazon’s Kitchen Computer

Two years after rumors first surfaced about a top secret Amazon project to develop a kitchen computer, today we may finally have a hint of what the company had in mind when rumors first surfaced in August 2015.

Not that Amazon is calling the Echo Show a kitchen computer since, after all, the new device can do a whole lot more. With a 7″ touch screen, full microphone array, a camera for machine vision and more, Amazon obviously sees this device as a video, voice and touch enabled Swiss Army knife for most any room in the home.

But let’s be honest, half of Echos ending up in the kitchen, and with the new features offered up by this new video-enabled Echo device, this is the most kitchen-friendly from Amazon yet.

Here’s why:

Video Skills: By adding a 7″ touchscreen and video-enabled skills, the Echo Show finally offers kitchen-centric content creators a medium to delivery visually rich content. The Food Network has already created an Alexa Skill to send recipes from your favorite cooking shows to the Amazon Echo, but I can pretty much guarantee they and other video-centric food content producers are chomping at the bit to create video-enabled skills.

All of which is good because…

Kitchen Use Cases Require Visual Communication: One could argue that outside of the entertainment area/living room, the kitchen is the most visual of all rooms. The combination of voice commands combined with visual display that can surface cooking videos, recipes, shopping lists, food inventories and so much more makes it a natural for the kitchen.

It Can Also See: Much like the Echo Look, the Show has a camera. While obviously for video communication, I also envision the camera being used to read bar or QR codes, identify products by sight, remote home monitoring and even enabling contextual recommendations based on whether its dad or daughter standing in front of it.

Video Communication And Monitoring: The kitchen is the central gathering place in the home, where family entertains, eats and just hangs out. With a built-in video intercom, this allows mom or dad to check in the kids while making dinner, see who is at the door, or even place a phone call to grandma using the built-in video intercom or calling technology.

Bottom line, while it isn’t just for the kitchen, I suspect the Show was made in large part with the kitchen in mind. And while I am not sure if the Show is what Amazon originally envisioned when it was dreaming of the kitchen computer back in 2015, I am pretty sure this is what the original project has become.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on the Echo Home….

Microsoft Unveils Echo Competitor Powered By Cortana

Microsoft is not necessarily a leader in the smart home these days, trailing Samsung, Apple and Google in platforms and hardware offerings and instead focusing on other core offerings. But as the Amazon Echo and then Google Home voice assistants jumped onto the scene, the tech world speculated about whether Apple and Microsoft would put their respective AI voice assistants – Siri and Cortana – into physical devices, too.

Rumors abound that Apple is about to do just that – but they’ll be last to the table as Microsoft previewed its Cortana-powered wireless speaker on Monday. Ahead of their BUILD developer conference, which starts tomorrow, Microsoft showed off the Invoke, a speaker manufactured by Harman Kardon and enabled by the company’s digital voice assistant.

Invoke does what Google Home & Echo do for the most part – weather reports, news, music, reminders, timers, etc – and the details thus far are fairly underwhelming. The company reported Invoke will offer “deep integration with Microsoft’s suite of knowledge and productivity tools,” making it a potentially interesting tool for home offices or businesses as a scheduling tool. The device will also have integration with Skype, allowing users to make calls via the platform.  It will certainly sound better than the Echo with Harman Kardon audio engineering and design behind the speaker – and that feature alone might drive audiophiles to Invoke over the competition.

Microsoft’s blog does not detail how or if the device will allow for third-party developers to build additional features and functions – something both Echo and Google Home are capitalizing on to add use cases and turn the speakers into sous chefs, personal assistants and smart home controllers.

Harman Kardon’s press release announcing the speaker definitely positions the audio brand to offer a competitive device to other premium smart speakers like Sonos – with a high-powered AI engine inside. The speaker will have seven microphones and advanced ambient noise technology to help Cortana hear you even in loud environments – another area where HK’s contribution could give Invoke an edge over the Echo. Pricing wasn’t given yet but the product should be available via Microsoft stores in the fall.

With the BUILD conference starting tomorrow, we’ll be sure to share updates and details about Invoke and the features it might bring to the home and kitchen.

Ok Google, What’s For Dinner?

When Google Home first arrived on the scene, Mike and Ashley speculated on the Smart Kitchen Show about how it would stack up against Amazon Echo. Amazon’s big entrance into the smart home, Echo came with convenient functions like timers, grocery lists, playing on-demand streaming music and radio services and eventually included recipe skills. It was an ideal device to sit on your kitchen counter.

Google introduced its answer to Echo but at first lacked the functionality that Echo has grown to enjoy due to its open API and thousands of skills developed by third parties. One of those skill areas that’s seen growth is in food & beverage, especially recipes. But this week, Google partnered with big food content houses like the Food Network, New York Times and Bon Appetit to give Home users access to over 5,000 recipes that can be read step by step by the Google Assistant.

The interesting thing about Google Home’s announcement is the way Google is adding functionality to its device. Amazon’s Alexa relies on skills developed by other companies – in order to get access to Allrecipes content, for example, you have to enable that skill in your app before you can use it.

Google takes a different approach; if you have a specific recipe you want to look up, you can head to the Google Assistant app on your phone, pick it out and send it to Google Home to walk through. So a component of this feature still involves your phone – unless you want suggested recipes, and then you can just ask “Ok Google, let’s make spaghetti” and Google’s Assistant will suggest a recipe for you. That suggestion feature, enabled without any input on the part of the user, is fairly unique.

The process is a little more intuitive and baked into the platform than Alexa skills, which sometimes can be clunky depending on how the developer choose to integrate. Some skills require you to say “Alexa, ask (brand/company) to XYZ” which is an awkward way to speak and harder to remember.

Google also choose powerhouse brands to partner with for this integration – collectively, Food Network, NYT and Bon Appetit have amassed loads of food content through the years and probably have recipes for just about anything you’d want to cook. In fact, these and other publication and content houses are constantly thinking about how to leverage their digital warehouses of recipes and food knowledge and partnerships like these are easy ways to make money outside of traditional advertising.

According to Google, the feature will start rolling out in the coming days. We’ll finally be able to say – Ok Google, let’s eat.

What Does Samsung’s Bixby Mean For The Smart Kitchen?

If you follow any tech news, you’ve seen announcements in the past week coming out of Samsung around their Galaxy S8 launch. One of the most intriguing parts of the Samsung event was the news around Bixby, Samsung’s AI assistant and answer to Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant. In some ways, it competes with the Amazon Echo too – Bixby is both a voice assistant and a smart home controller as well as an augmented reality camera.

Bixby comes with a range of new functions baked into the Galaxy S8, many of which have some interesting implications in the smart kitchen.

First, Bixby actually gives you virtual control over apps on your phone with your voice. At the moment, that functionality is extended only to Samsung apps – the phone, messaging, email, camera and video, etc – but it opens up the possibility for mobile apps to be “Bixby” friendly. Adding voice to apps that help you in your kitchen could be a unique way to get voice control without a standalone device that sits on your countertop. A recipe app that Bixby could read you the instructions step-by-step would be a quick way to get guided cooking without an extra gadget or device.

The Verge got an up close look at another Bixby feature – augmented reality via the S8’s camera. Point the camera at an object and Bixby recognizes what it is you’re both looking at and identifies it. Though not a new concept (Google Googles, Amazon Flow), it seems like a fairly flawless execution and Samsung is supposedly in talks with folks like Amazon, making it an interesting AR solution for things like grocery shopping. Other interesting applications include a partnership with Vivino that gives you tasting notes when you scan a bottle of wine.

Finally, there’s Bixby Home, which is Samsung’s answer to aggregating your home’s smart devices and controlling them via voice. Similar to the Echo or Google Home, with the difference again being the in phone location as opposed to an external device. If you could tell your phone, which might be in your kitchen as you follow a recipe app, to preheat the oven as you finish mixing cupcake batter, that might be useful. But do users typically carry around their phones from room to room at home? The benefit of an Echo or Google Home is the convenience – walk into a room, issue a command.

It seems like Bixby has some potential benefits, but it remains to be seen if it will work as promised. CNET had some fairly buggy experiences with Bixby though and they point out that Samsung isn’t even committed to putting Bixby on the S8 quite yet. It could appear as a software update later in the year. There are also other AI and machine learning technologies developing in the kitchen that might make a voice assistant on your phone irrelevant in the future. After all, the smartphone is just another pane of glass where information can be consumed and controlled – artificial intelligence can be baked into just about anything.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Starbucks Announces In-Car Voice Ordering On Ford SYNC Via Amazon’s Alexa

Starbucks held its annual shareholders meeting yesterday, revealing its financial success 25 years after the Seattle-based coffee giant’s IPO. Starbucks spent time talking about its hiring plans in the future, new gluten free and vegan products and new tech and digital innovations, including voice ordering via Amazon’s Alexa in the car and voice mobile ordering.

The company announced back in January that it was creating a skill for Alexa and mobile voice or text ordering for the iPhone and Android apps. Today the voice and text ordering go live for the 100k+ customers who have the mobile app on their phones.

More interesting though is the partnership with Amazon and Ford to allow in-car ordering via Alexa. Amazon and Ford announced that Alexa would be integrated into Ford SYNC 3 technology at CES this year, allowing drivers to access the voice AI platform in any Ford vehicle with the upgraded smart tech.

Now, Amazon, Ford and Starbucks are working together to enable the Starbucks skill inside the SYNC 3 platform. A simple “Alexa, ask Starbucks to start my order” allows you to order coffee and have it ready when you arrive without ever picking up your smartphone. Using the mobile pay & order app, customers have to designate regular or favorite orders from which to select from and up to 10 local stores from where they’d like to pick-up. The SYNC 3 technology is inside most 2016 and newer model Ford vehicles.

As someone who struggled with trying to order her usual soy latte while leaving preschool dropoff (and just bought a Volkswagon), I am pretty envious.

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