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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon Echo

Turning Text Messages Into Machine Language For The Smart Home

There’s a new race in the smart home – it’s not about who will control your home but rather how. The introduction of voice assistant devices Amazon Echo and Google Home have definitely changed the conversation and the market for how we interact with the tech inside our homes. But if speaking commands to things in the house to turn them on or off or check their status seems unnatural, you could always text instead.

That’s the premise of Unified Inbox, a small company based Singapore that’s developed soon-to-be-patented software that delivers smart home control via text messenger. It’s easy to see the appeal of texting your home – it’s an easy and common way for humans to communicate with each other and it removes the awkwardness of barking out orders to an inanimate object.

The CEO of Unified Inbox, Toby Ruckert, makes the case to Reuters, saying “Think of it as a universal translator between the languages that machines speak … and us humans.” Though the company is small and privately funded, it has companies like Samsung, Bosch and IBM jumping on board to integrate functionality into their own devices. Using Unified Inbox’s platform, manufacturers can add a text assistant to their product, capitalizing on the ubiquity of smartphones in every home.

The API developed by Unified Inbox is called UnificationEngine or UE and works by taking text inputs to a messenger app and translates the human words into machine language. Described as an “IoT messenging platform,” UE was developed to bridge the language gap between people and the things around them.

Credit: Reuters

Text commands such as “turn off the lights,” “start the coffee machine at 6,” and “preheat the oven to 450” can be typed into over 20 different messenger apps along with Twitter and SMS to control a variety of home devices. From ovens and kettles, the platform can work with many appliances and Unified Inbox is testing more including garage door openers and toasters.

But why have “more than half of the world’s appliance makers” – according to Ruckert – signed up to partner with this small startup? Reuters reports that Ruckert and other tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg see a huge future in text control – and think that big companies are worried about Amazon’s dominance.

“They’re worried the big tech companies’ one-appliance-controls-all approach will relegate them to commodity players, connecting to Alexa or another dominant platform, or being cast aside if Amazon moves into making its own household appliances.”

Check out the full story on Unified Inbox, their API and how machine learning that continues to change how we talk to our things.

Google Home Adds Shopping Feature And Partnerships With National Retailers

When Google launched the Google Home voice assistant speaker, they demonstrated their commitment to the smart home and the growing trend of voice control, a trend so far led by Amazon. Taking aim at the Echo market, Google launched Home with a big vision but not as many features as enthusiasts would have liked.

Still, 2017 is the year that “works with” Google Home becomes the new “Alexa skill” and no one is counting Google out of the game. The one area where Amazon previously had an inherent lead over Google, of course, was in its powerful commerce engine. Alexa makes it easy to order items from Amazon and, if you’re a Prime member, have them brought straight to your door in two days or less.

But news last week changed that. Google announced via a blog post that it has partnered with a number of big name retailers and added the ability to voice shop from them using Google Assistant. Retail Dive has the full story on Google’s new partnerships, with brands like Costco, Walgreens, Whole Foods, Bed, Bath & Beyond and even Petsmart, Google is clearly trying to cover its commerce bases with everything from food and grocery to household and pharmacy.

Google’s blog post on the announcement gives users a quick walk-through of how to get started. With simple commands like “Ok Google, how do I shop?” Google Assistant will walk users through the process. Or you can also just say “Ok Google, order paper towels” and presumably, it will. It’s less clear exactly who you’re getting paper towels from, though it’s likely you have to set up store preferences in your Google Home account. You also have to add a credit card on file to automatically charge upon ordering.

Credit: Google

The blog also says the service is free – for now. After April 30, it appears Google may have plans to create some type of Prime-esque membership for users to be able to take advantage of voice command shopping.

Google’s massive search and data engine give Google Home inherent advantages in the long run over competitive voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo. And with this new shopping feature, they’re looking to grab some of Amazon’s native territory as well.

Amazon Set To Introduce A Slew of Connected Home Hardware In 2017

If you think Amazon’s ready to rest on its laurels with the Echo and Fire TV, think again.

Based on conversations I’ve had with numerous people familiar about what Amazon is planning, the company can be expected to introduce a slew of new products in 2017.

While the details of the products are still not clear, here are a few clues I’ve gathered about what we can expect:

Bold and provocative. Multiple people have told me Amazon is doubling down on their penchant for bold products this year. Amazon both surprised and bewildered many industry watchers with their out-of-the-box approach with the Echo and Dash button, and it’s safe to say we can probably expect more surprises this year. One person told me one or two of their new products are “provocative.” While I am not sure what this could mean, it doesn’t surprise me. After all, this is Bezos and Amazon we’re talking about.

Doing What Hasn’t Worked Before, Only With Over Ten Million Installed Base. One of the people I’ve talked to said Amazon is likely to try things other companies attempted early on in the smart home without success, only “with the resources of a company of more than ten million customers.” My interpretation of this is Amazon’s new products will leverage the Echo installed base that is quickly moving north of 10 million. This also means we can probably expect the Echo to morph into even more of a connected home “hub” with its increasingly robust capabilities powered by a maturing Alexa platform and its growing third party ecosystem.

Leveraging In-Home Consultations. I was the first to write about Amazon’s in-home consultations, and just this past Monday I was visited by an Amazon tech consultant.  While I wasn’t able to wrestle anything out of a very on-message consultant who went by the name of Corey, what this visit did show me was how Amazon could easily leverage these visit to get people’s homes to be essentially “run on Amazon” and introduce new product concepts.

What exactly these products will look like is anyone’s guess at this point. While there have been early stories about new products like a  “kitchen computer,” there hasn’t been much beyond that. Unlike Apple, which in recent years has become as leaky as the early Trump White House, Amazon has become really good at guarding their secrets ever since early word of the Fire Phone leaked. As one person familiar with the company jokingly told me, “Bezos is investing in rockets to send people who reveal secrets into space.”

Amazon knows the result of such secrecy is surprise and intense coverage, both of which feed into Amazon’s ability to convert to sales when combined with front page promotion on Amazon.com.

And now, with the company’s strong success around Alexa and Echo, their intense hiring for their connected product division and their expanded reach into the home through personalized tech consultations, Amazon is teeing 2017 up to be a year of more surprises.

Amazon Offering Free ‘Smart Home Consultations’ in Seattle & Six Other West Coast Markets

Back in November, a curious job posting showed up on Amazon’s website for a “home assistant.” The job, which was first flagged by the Seattle Times, sounded more Merry Maid than Geek Squad.

It seemed like an odd direction for Amazon, unless of course it was some way to extend their Alexa dominance. As I wrote back then, “there’s a chance Amazon sees the assistant role as one that will leverage existing in-home technology a creates a home that ‘runs on Amazon.’… Amazon could write off these assistant visits as a ‘truck roll’ investment, one which is paid back through a home fully integrated with Amazon platforms such as Alexa, Dash, commerce, etc.”

And now it looks like I may have been right.

That’s because today I received an email from Amazon offering a free in-home ‘smart home consultation.’ The consultation consisted of a free 45 minute visit from an expert who would evaluate my Wi-Fi signal strength, let me try out smart home products and, of course, test run voice control my home with Alexa.

At the end of the visit, the consultation would create a customized recommendation list of smart home products.

One thing Amazon emphasizes is the expert coming to your home is an Amazon employee. They go on to say each expert has previous technology “experience” and that they have completed over 100 hours of training on products, customer service and “Amazon training.”

Early reviews of the consultations are all pretty good. The earliest reviews for the smart home consultations were in November, but the vast majority have come in the last week, indicating the company is expanding its trial rollout footprint.

The free consultations are currently available in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Orange County and San Jose, California and are being offered to select Amazon Prime customers in those markets.

Why would Amazon do this? That’s easy: they see they have an early lead in the smart home with Alexa and, as I indicated back in November, they can use these consultations to get a consumer to run their home “on Amazon.”

How will Amazon’s move into the smart home and connected home services impact the food and kitchen? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit to find out. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

What Happened To Smart Fridges In 2016?

As we continue our end of year wrap-up series, we wanted to drive into some smart kitchen appliance categories to see what happened (or didn’t happen) to the category as a whole and make some predictions for what’s on the horizon for 2017.

Hey Alexa, what’s in my fridge?

If there was a darling of connected tech in 2016, the Amazon Echo was it. Voice control was barely a whisper at CES last year and by September, if you didn’t have voice control baked into your smart home or entertainment device (or at least have it on your product roadmap), you were irrelevant. And Alexa fit right into the kitchen, with hands-free control in the one room if the house you don’t want to be touching your smartphone.

Voice control makes more sense for devices that do stuff – telling Alexa to pre-heat the oven is a pretty useful skill. So, the Amazon Echo compatibility for fridges is a shorter list, but worth a look:

  • GE – GE launched their Geneva skill to control a range of GE Wi-Fi appliances, including fridges but also ovens and washing machines. For fridges, Alexa can control the temperature, turn the icemaker on or off, prep hot water for coffee or tea, or just give you a status on how the fridge is doing.
  • The Samsung Family Hub connects to Amazon Echo and you can use Alexa to control all the things on the Hub’s OS like Pandora but you can also order groceries through the Groceries by Mastercard app, mirroring Amazon’s own ordering services available through voice.

Speaking of Samsung…

The fridge as the home hub

The concept of the connected fridge isn’t a new one, with appliance makers adding Wi-Fi connectivity to their products for the last several years. One of the companies on the early smart fridge bandwagon was Samsung, who began talking about an internet refrigerator back in 2001. Later during that decade, Samsung was demoing smart fridges at CES; the fridge displayed a small-ish touch screen with basic connected functionality.

Then came the Samsung Family Hub. A beast of a machine (in both size and price), this fridge first debuted last year at CES 2016 with its official launch in May. With its giant 1080p touchscreen on the front, it looked at first glance, like a version of their other Wi-Fi connected fridges on steroids. But the Family Hub actually packs some interesting features that while might seem frivolous at the outset, actually hint at some larger tech trends for fridges and other appliances in the future.

The giant touchscreen features interesting apps like the Groceries by Mastercard app which allows you to order food from FreshDirect and ShopRite, right from your fridge. The fridge also gives users the ability to photo tag their items to keep track of what’s there.

The other future-facing features are the cameras placed in the fridge’s doors to let you see what’s inside when the doors are closed. Why would we want to do that? Well to check when you’re at the grocery store to see what you’re out of, for one. You can also look inside the fridge from the touchscreen on the front, negating the need to open the doors. LG debuted similar functionality at CES 2016, with theirs using a “knocking” feature and a clear window on the front of the fridge to let someone knock, illuminate the interior lights and see what’s in the fridge without opening the door.

But ordering groceries from your fridge’s touchscreen and being able to see what’s inside from your phone in a supermarket isn’t really the compelling story here. The story is what Samsung (and others) haven’t yet put inside this device – and what will make refrigerators way smarter in the future.

The fridge as a part of the kitchen’s OS ecosystem

Moving from connectivity and entertainment to a true smart appliance, the fridge of the future might actually have a database of knowledge and machine learning behind it that will allow it to know things about your food. Startups like Innit are pioneering a new category using food data along with image recognition software to allow an appliance like a refrigerator to recognize food without any user inputs and generate useful information from that. Information like a recipe that could be made with the contents left in the fridge on the day before shopping day would help prevent food waste and also give users helpful ideas for dinner.

The technology concept driving Innit is what’s missing from the Samsung Family Hub and every other Wi-Fi connected fridge. Cameras and connectivity are great, but when something requires the user to constantly input and maintain a database in order to fully deliver on its usefulness, it falls apart. Consumers don’t want another thing to have to update, they want tech that makes things easier.

Innit’s partnership with appliance giant Whirlpool is proof that manufacturers are recognizing the shortcomings of current technology. And the opportunity in the kitchen isn’t going unnoticed; Microsoft announced in a blog post in early September it too is planning to build a fridge with a connected, machine learning based platform. Microsoft will collaborate with Liebherr’s appliance division to create a platform that uses computer-based deep learning algorithms with imaging software to recognize food that’s placed inside a refrigerator.

Unique to Microsoft is the modularity they’re building into every “SmartDevice ready” appliance, theoretically making any refrigerator purchased today easily upgradable in the future. Products like the Samsung Family Hub fridge have been criticized for offering a host of features without any clear answers on how the device will keep pace with future innovation and developments. With the price tags on connected appliances still one to three times what consumers pay for their dumb counterparts, future-proofing these products seems critical to their long-term success. This coupled with the longer buying cycles of white goods mean appliance manufacturers might start thinking about their revenue streams and what kind of role that plays, whether that’s through a grocery replenishment partnership or technology upgrades that offer new functionality.

Appliance-As-A-Service (AAAS….?) 

Mike Wolf wrote a post here at The Spoon and an even larger analysis at the NextMarket blog on the concept of paying monthly fees to obtain a consumer good, or what’s known as the “X as a service” model. Much of the consumer market is trending towards a service or subscription model, from streaming videos to clothing and furniture. Could kitchen appliances follow suit?

Bad acronym aside, it’s not completely crazy. We’re finally seeing appliances evolve to provide significant value beyond the existing reactive position they’ve held in the kitchen for the last fifty or sixty years. There’s machine learning and artificial intelligence set to change how we cook and how tasty and well-prepared the food we sit down to eat will be along with connectivity giving us capabilities and efficiencies that might make us want to cook more with more convenience. But the current trajectory requires consumers to piece together a smart kitchen and then also keep tabs on upgrades and seek out tech support for issues they encounter. What if appliances like smart fridges could be purchased as a service, with upgrades and support and maybe other services baked in?

Though we haven’t seen any company make a serious move towards AAAS just yet, we think it’s an area to watch in 2017 and beyond. If for no other reason than it’s actually a pretty awesome acronym.

With CES 2017 just a week away, we’re sure to see more developments in the smart fridge and more broadly, smart kitchen appliance category.

Smart Home Insiders: Virtual Assistants, Not Kitchen, Story Of 2016

It’s unanimous: virtual assistants and voice interfaces were the smart home story of 2016.

That’s what 138 smart home industry executives told NextMarket Insights in a just-completed survey about the state of the smart home. The virtual/voice assistant category, which includes Amazon’s Echo/Alexa products and Google Home, was chosen as the defining story of 2016 by a large margin, with over 2/3 of respondents (68%) picking the category.

A distant second place was “smart front door”, which includes products such as video doorbells and connected locks, which was chosen by 13% percent of respondents. Smart security and mesh Wi-Fi were both 7%.

Smart kitchen was chosen by only 4% of respondents, which is not altogether surprising given the nascent nature of the category as well as it’s focused nature as compared to a horizontally disruptive technology such as virtual assistants. Technologies like Alexa are seen as having a wide across all areas of the smart home, while kitchen tech impacts a focused area (food and eating).

Even more nascent than the smart kitchen was connected commerce, which includes products like the Amazon Dash button. Only 2% saw this category as the defining story of the year.

The Spoon Smart Kitchen 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

It’s time for The Spoon’s first annual holiday gift guide! Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness have passed and it’s really the first year we’ve seen many anticipated smart kitchen devices hit the market, it seemed like the perfect time to roll out our guide. Picking this year’s selections was not easy – the food tech and smart kitchen spaces are packed with great stuff. But we wanted to limit the guide to stuff you could actually purchase (not pre-order or back on Kickstarter, with a few exceptions) and hand to your loved one around or shortly after the holidays.

Now you might be thinking – I’m the one who loves food and tech in our house! The beauty of this guide is that it’s easily forwardable – perhaps send to your spouse or loved ones with a wink emoji and some subtle hints, and you’ll find that smart kitchen gear you’ve always wanted under the tree.

High-Tech Kitchen Help

joule-sweepstakes-dinner-3If you’ve got an amateur chef on your list this year, you can’t go wrong with sous vide. Sous vide is an older cooking technique using warm water to slowly and evenly cook foods like meat, fish and vegetables. Recent devices like the Joule from ChefSteps have increased the popularity of sous vide and made it easy to incorporate into any kitchen.

The Joule itself is a long, cylindrical water circulator and can be easily dropped into a pot of water to prepare food. It looks kind of like a high-tech rolling pin crossed with an Amazon Echo – but the noticeable difference between Joule and other sous vide cookers out there is the lack of a screen. The smartphone app does all the work – including preheating the device to the right temperature. The only thing left for the chef to do is season, seal and place the food in the water. The lack of a screen makes it more lightweight and smaller than other sous vide cookers, an appeal for some who want to minimize space in the kitchen.

Once cooking is complete, the dish can be removed and seared or finished on the stove for a perfect crust. Reviews of the Joule sous vide cooker promise some of the juiciest, most tender (insert food here) you’ve ever had.

Price: $199 on ChefSteps.com
(ChefSteps say they guarantee shipping by the holidays!)

Turn A Beer Fan Into A Brewmaster

Craft beer, spirits and cocktail related gifts are popular for those who like to imbibe around the holidays (…that’s everyone, right?) You could go a step up and get the beer fan on image001your list their own at home brew system. The folks at PicoBrew created the Pico, a simple pod-based brewing device that allows amateur brewers to customize their favorite IPA, pilsner, stout or pale ale in a week’s time. The PicoBrew PicoPaks and unique system take the mess out of home brewing and fermentation and each contains a different combo of grains, hops and yeast for each craft beer.

The PicoPaks are sold separately but come in over a hundred varieties so it’s easy to pair a few favorites with the system for a killer gift. And unlike older homebrew systems, the Pico’s compact design is ready for prime time – it’s cute enough to sit on the kitchen countertop and has a built-in steam cleaning mechanism. The digital display screen allows the user to adjust alcohol and bitterness levels for any brew and it makes up to five liters of beer at one time.

The Pico is one of those smart kitchen gadgets that will probably win you coolest family member award instantly; you might even get to sample the new brewmaster’s first brew attempt. Check out our complete review of The Pico before you buy.

Price: $799 at Williams-Sonoma

Infuse The Holidays With Perfect Tea

Tea and coffee are common holiday gifts for hot beverage drinkers, but for those who have a special affinity for tea, the smart tea infuser Teforia can create a custom cup of tea brewed to the exact right temperature and strength. The infuser looks like a cross between a traditional coffee maker and a high-tech chemistry set and comes equipped with a propriety technology called the Teforia Selective Infusion Profile System terforia(“Teforia SIPS” ™). Sounds complicated, right? Basically, Teforia has created a device that knows the best way to brew tea, taking into account things like steep time, infusion temperature and the varietal of tea you’re using.

But who really needs a tea infuser? Tea is actually considered most widely consumed beverage in the world next to water and can be found in almost 80% of all U.S. households. Most of us, even avid tea fans (raises hand) use a kettle to boil water and a simple tea bag stuck in a mug. But Teforia claims not all teas are created equal, and consuming tea the typical way actually does the ancient beverage a huge disservice.

So bypass the specialty tea box in the gift shop this year as you’re picking out gifts – chances are, if someone is a fan of tea, the Teforia Infuser, maybe with some of their hand-picked varietals thrown in, will blow their mind.

Price: $1499, starts shipping December 1 if you order on Teforia’s website.

Coffee – Right From Your Phone

Onto the coffee lovers – if you’re a true java fan, you know that there’s not one temp fits all for coffee brewing. What makes a good cup of coffee, well, good, often has to do with extraction, or the process of hot water drawing the flavor from the grounbrewer-smds. It’s a delicate process and water that’s too hot will leave coffee tasting bitter. With the Behmor Connected Coffee Maker, that problem is solved through customizable brew profiles that all coffee drinkers to adjust the brewing temperature and pre-soak time before crafting that perfect cup.

And, as the name suggests, Behmor’s coffee maker comes with a connected smartphone app that allows you to program, adjust and monitor your coffee from the comfort of your bed. The app will even text you when your coffee’s done, thus finally giving you a reason to get out of bed on a cold winter morning. In addition to the custom brew control, Behmor’s actually build in some unique technology to optimize coffee extraction with a pulsed water flow and a grounds basket designed to saturate every single coffee ground.

Pair this with a local coffee blend and you’ve got every java lover’s dream come true.

Price: $234 on Amazon

Give The Gift Of An Oven That Knows Exactly What You’re Cooking

Credit: JuneAn oven might seem like an odd gift to give someone – unless it’s your spouse and you’re in the middle of a kitchen renovation, I suppose. But what if that oven was packed with enough technology to recognize the food you place in it and know exactly how to cook it? That’s exactly what the June Oven is designed to do.

Early reviews on the June are mixed – and some are even downright harsh – but we still think the June could be an interesting gift for those with money to spare who want the most cutting edge oven tech on the market.

Price: $1495 for pre-order on Juneoven.com

For The Person Who Actually Loves to Cook

So maybe you don’t want to spend over $1k on a magical oven, but you do have someone on your list who likes cooking and is always on the hunt for new recipes. The Drop Kitchen Scale with companion smart app is a good way to dip your toe into the world of connected kitchen gear without breaking the bank. The Dro1407862226-order_drop5p Scale looks like a basic kitchen scale, but when paired with the app, provides a basic guided cooking system that walks the user through a chosen recipe and helps them weigh out ingredients along the way.

One of the best features of the Drop Kitchen ecosystem is its adaptability. Within the app, you can find and customize a recipe for the exact quantity or taste preference you’d like and the recipe will adjust portions and ingredients for you. So no more guesstimating how much flour you should use for a cupcake recipe you’re trying to half, Drop will give you precise measurements for the amount you need. With so many people using their smartphones and tablets in the kitchen to read recipes, the Drop Kitchen Scale and app will make cooking that much more enjoyable.

Price: $78.98 on Amazon (product is being end-of-lifed as Drop transitions into platform based technology)

Alexa, Finish My Holiday Shopping

160517094422-amazon-echo-alexa-00003213-1024x576Ok, this might not technically be a kitchen-specific gift, but the vast majority of Amazon Echo users I’ve encountered (myself included) keep the device in the kitchen – and for good reason. Alexa isn’t just a helpful virtual assistant, she can also be a pretty handy sous chef. From the very advanced – enable the Allrecipes skill and get step-by-step walk-through of any recipe available on Allrecipes – to the basic – ask Alexa how many teaspoons is in a tablespoon (1 tbl = 3 tsp, handy when your tablespoon constantly goes missing), Alexa is a hands-free help during meal prep.

The other helpful kitchen-specific feature, aside from listening to a news flash, a podcast or Spotify with a simple request, is the shopping list feature. Ask Alexa to add things to your shopping list as you run out of it, ensuring the next trip to the grocery store will result in a full pantry restock.

The Amazon Echo is usually $179.99, but is often on sale (and out of stock) around the holidays.

Connect To Your Tea

Maybe you have a tea lover on your list, but the idea of 800 bucks for the Teforia Infuserappkettle isn’t realistic. Before Teforia, there was a device called AppKettle, a connected tea kettle with less bells and whistles, but an easier price to swallow.

AppKettle is a connected tea kettle with a companion app that allows users to heat water on demand, from anywhere. With a nice stainless steel finish and both app and native device controls, this is a nice little upgrade to your traditional tea kettle. With the ability to control the temp of the water, AppKettle might be a perfect gift for new parents on your list who are bottle feeding. There’s nothing worse than waiting for water to heat up while your new baby cries for milk.

Price: AppKettle sadly is only shipping in the UK for around $160, but the CEO told The Spoon they have plans to ship in the US in 2017 with added Alexa integration.

Celebrate The New Year With A Perfect Drink

The season of gift-giving will soon be over which means it’s not too early to be making New Year’s Eve plans. And generally speaking, the most vital part of a good New Year’s Eve at17509bc290a4e2ab8ed6ca1c193d86e6 home, whether you’re parenting a toddler and stuck home playing Cards Against Humanity or single and hosting a fancy dinner party with a DJ and a large crowd, are the beverages. And if you’re going to be at home, you want cocktails that taste like they were made by a professional mixologist at a swanky bar, no?

That’s why the Perfect Drink 2.0 Smart Scale and Interactive App make such a great gift – it’s the smart kitchen substitute for an expensive bartending course. The Perfect Drink scale has over 400 drink recipes and walks you through ingredients, letting you know when you’ve poured the perfect amount of each. And if you pour too much, let’s say, gin, Perfect Drink Scale will help you adjust the rest of the ingredients so you don’t ruin the drink. The Cabinet feature lets you keep track of what you have on hand and there are recipes for every season, along with tried and true favorites.

Price: $39.99 on Amazon

Make Spaghetti Out Of….Everything

Credit: Williams-Sonoma

Tech lover or not, everyone loves a good kitchen gadget that’s useful and helpful without many bells and whistles. I once asked a well-known chef what he couldn’t live without in the kitchen and he said – basically – a good pan and some heat. But the extras can be fun too, which is why we’re putting the spiralizer into our first-ever gift guide.

The spiralizer is one of those low-tech gadgets that has amazing utility and, as a result, has a huge following. It’s basically a handheld device that turns average vegetables into pasta, creating a healthy (and delicious) meal. The spiralizer is best known for its ability to make zucchini spaghetti, but pictures (and testimonials) indicate it can be used to create garnishes and turn other vegetables into a pasta shape, too.

For anyone on your list looking to eat healthier, add this to their stocking and tell them to look forward to a spiralized 2017.

Price: Depends on the model, this basic one is $12.99 on Amazon while this slightly fancier (maybe less labor-intensive version) is $39.95 at Williams-Sonoma.

Read Up On The Future Of Food + The Kitchen

One of my favorite gifts to give and receive are books – you can’t go wrong. And there are a few books in the food tech and food science space that would make excellent presents under the tree.

The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt – The Food Lab is a tour de force – the food bible for foodlabanyone looking to infuse science through simple techniques to enhance everyday cooking. The 1000+ page plus recipe book is quite a departure from ordinary cookbooks; authored by Serious Eats managing culinary directorJ. Kenji López-Alt, also a James Beard Award winner, The Food Lab focuses squarely on food science. Looking at the interactions between heat, energy & molecules and how they all work together to create truly delicious food. The techniques to achieving better food aren’t necessarily complicated, and for anyone interested in nerding out over the science behind your favorite recipes, this book is a perfect (and heavy!) gift.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya – The firstmodernist Modernist Cuisine book series spawned a cult-like following of the brand and its founder, former Microsoft CTO and technologist turned food connoisseur, Nathan Myhrvold. These books – hundreds of dollars worth – are truly for the hardcore food science nerd, someone who wants to dive deep into the art, science, design, techniques and research on human diet staple: bread. Housed in a stainless steel case, the five-volume series delivers over 1500 recipes, a wire-bound kitchen manual and over 2300 pages of knowledge on bread. While it’s not available until 2017, the right person will swoon over the gift of a Modernist Bread pre-order receipt. 

sousvideSous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals – From Lisa Fetterman, the founder of Nomiku, one of the first mainstream sous vide machines, Sous Vide at Home just hit the shelves in early November. Sous vide is becoming increasingly popular as a technique using the slow heat of a water bath (described above in our Joule write-up) and this cookbook is a guide to creating chef-quality food using any sous vide device at home. It would pair well with a brand new sous vide machine as a perfect foodie gift.

So there you have it – our first annual holiday gift guide! We hope you find something for every food and tech lover on your list.

Happy Holidays!

Looks Like Amazon May Be Building A Kitchen Computer After All

Whaddya know: The long-rumored kitchen computer from Amazon may be real.

One can’t be blamed for having doubts, because ever since the device code-named Project Kabinet was first rumored last year, info – in typical Amazon fashion – has been scarce.

And while I recently speculated that Alexa’s fast growing library of kitchen-centric skills could constitute a virtual kitchen computer, it looks like Amazon may have something a little more literal in mind.

Back when I first wrote about Project Kabinet for Forbes in August of 2015, I speculated about what such a product would be:

If you take all the pieces of Amazon’s strategy to enter the kitchen – Dash, Alexa/Echo, and Amazon Fresh (the company’s home grocery delivery service) – they are interesting but disjointed pieces of the same puzzle, one in which Amazon is trying to figure out how to bring all the things we do in a kitchen into Amazon’s orbit. Whether it’s discovery of food or recipes, restocking our shelves or cooking itself, Amazon knows technology will have a bigger part to play in all of these in the future. Kabinet will likely attempt to unify all of these activities together and manage them using one device, by not only incorporating technology from all of these efforts but also integrating with a variety of third-party appliances to manage all of these activities for them.

In short, Kabinet will likely be Amazon’s physical manifestation of a kitchen operating system

How does that compare to the Bloomberg report? Here’s how they describe the new Amazon device:

The new device will have a touchscreen measuring about seven inches, a major departure from Amazon’s existing cylindrical home devices that are controlled and respond mostly through the company’s voice-based Alexa digital assistant, according to two people familiar with the matter. This will make it easier to access content such as weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and news, the people said. They asked not to be identified speaking about a product that has yet to be announced.

In Techcrunch’s report, they speculate that the new touchscreen Echo was designed, in part, to be “tilted to different viewing angles for easier use in the kitchen.”

While it’s hard to say if this new effort from Amazon would come close to the futuristic kitchen computer concept that unifies the different experiences of shopping, delivery, prep and cooking that I described in my Forbes piece, it’s intriguing that the company sees enough potential to create a device tailored towards the kitchen.

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Charlie Kindel talked about how the kitchen is the likely landing place for many – if not a majority – of Echos, and with over 100 Alexa food and drink skills alone, voice is rapidly emerging as the future interface for the kitchen. Throw in Amazon’s efforts to kill the middle of the grocery store with Dash, and this new Echo makes more and more sense.

ChefSteps Adds “Conversational Cooking” To Sous Vide With Echo Skill

We’ve talked a lot on The Spoon about the power of the Amazon Echo in the kitchen – as a virtual sous chef, a custom bartender, a unique component of guided cooking and just a helpful assistant (Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes!) And the power of the Echo as a frictionless controller in the smart home is evident in the myriad of skills announced from virtually every top smart home manufacturer – lights, thermostats, even locks now have limited voice control functionality with Alexa.

So it’s no surprise when one of the big players in the smart kitchen space announces plans to deepen its Echo integration, beefing up Alexa’s power as an AI assistant. ChefSteps, the Seattle-based culinary startup discussed its Amazon Echo skill for Joule, a sous vide cooker and the company’s inaugural hardware device last week at the GeekWire conference.

We covered Joule’s launch extensively, detailing ChefSteps move to give back money to backers when initial demand far exceeded their expectations and production costs were lower than expected. As the emerging sous vide trend quickly grew thanks in no small part to Joule competitors like Anova and Sansaire, Joules began shipping to eager backers and the company began talking about voice control. In an initial post about Amazon Echo, ChefSteps explained,

“ask any chef who’s ever barked “Fire!” at her line while a packed house awaited their entrees: sometimes, a cook’s best tool is her voice. That’s where Alexa comes in.”

Initially, the ChefSteps Joule skill for Echo is limited to basic, albeit helpful, functionality. Users could ask Alexa to check the status of the temperature, or set the temperature in preparation for a particular recipe, or stop the device. But ChefSteps’ co-founder Chef Chris Young discussed plans to go much further with Echo, using a deeper well of knowledge to create a true AI helper for your sous vide cooking.

Dubbed “conversational cooking,” the new Echo skill will enable home chefs to get even more help, asking Alexa to “start cooking my steak medium rare.” Joule users can give Alexa basic information, like the size of the meat and the level of doneness they’d like and Alexa will set Joule to the correct temp and cook it for the amount of time needed to accommodate. Perhaps most interestingly, Alexa will act as a customized cookbook of sorts, remembering the instructions from past recipes and storing them for future use.

In the future, Young and his team expect even cooler Alexa features like contextual recipe and cooking instructions based on time constraints and in-app food purchasing. In other words – they are just getting started.

The Dash Button: What Should Amazon Do About Its Forgotten Interface?

At this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Amazon’s Alexa Director Charlie Kindel said that while the last decade was defined by mobile devices and touch screens, the next decade would belong to voice as the emergence of highly-capable natural language interfaces like Alexa became mainstream. “We are,” he proclaimed, “entering the era of the Voice User Interface (VUI)”.

While I agree that voice will become an ever more important interface in coming years, I don’t believe physical interfaces are going anywhere. In fact, I think one physical interface in particular – the button – will be just as important a decade from now as it is today.

So why do I believe in the boring old button? In part because boring usually means simple, and there’s nothing more simple than a one-function button. Whether it’s the alarm clock snooze button or the brew button on your coffee maker, simple physical interfaces like this usually provide the most direct route to initiate an action, especially compared with the almost inexhaustible variations of commands and functions available through something like Alexa.

Don’t believe in the importance of buttons? Just imagine having to say “Alexa, shut the alarm off” at 5 AM after a late night instead of just slamming your snooze button in hangover-induced rage.

All of which brings us to Dash. Introduced a day before April Fool’s Day in 2015, it turned out the button was no joke, as the button (and the associated Dash Replenishment Service) represented an effort by Amazon to bring point-of-consumption ordering to the home and into the kitchen. ‘Why wait for consumers to go to the Amazon website?’ Amazon seemed to be asking with the Button, when they could move the point of replenishment and reordering to the actual point of consumption?

Ingenious in a way, but a year and a half after its introduction, it’s worth asking how the Button has done. While Amazon itself doesn’t release data, data from a survey of Dash users show moderate engagement at best. According to Slice Intelligence, research done in the spring of this year show that only half of folks who had a button used it.

While the low usage doesn’t seem to have discouraged Amazon about the broader Dash effort, it certainly seems announcements about new Dash buttons have slowed as of late. Lately most Dash announcements come in the form of new Dash Replenishment Service deals, as well as in the form of a the second generation Dash wand, a product that may gain new life now that its freed from the shackles of Amazon Fresh.

So as Alexa and era of the voice interface comes into focus, does the Dash – and connected buttons in general – have a place in the connected kitchen and broader smart home?

The answer is yes, but probably not in its current form.

The reality is the idea of brand-specific buttons (which is what Amazon Dash is) is too limiting. Instead, Amazon needs to make all Dash buttons universal single-function order/action machines.  In other words, they need to make them programmable, but unlike the AWS IoT button they’ve made available to those willing to go through lots of pain and suffering, Amazon needs to make one for consumers, not developers. In other words, they need an order-anything Dash button for the average Joe.

The reasons Amazon should move to universal buttons are both practical and strategic. From a practical standpoint, a Dash button for one specific product is too limiting for most consumers. I understand Amazon’s original vision was to bring connected ordering and allegiance to specific brand partners, but the reality is preferences change and consumers don’t want to be locked into specific products, often at higher prices.

I learned this lesson first hand. I was an early Dash button buyer, but the Izze beverage button I bought is now useless since my kids have moved on from the fizzy fruit drink. But if I could now re-program it to order, say, coffee or energy bars, I’d do it.

From a strategic standpoint, while limiting Dash buttons to single products likely makes the large brand conglomerates happy, it creates an artificial constraint around Dash button deployment. It also limits the data and insights they get. Imagine the unparalleled insight into reordering and consumption of consumables around the home Amazon would get with a order-anything button. Not only that, they’d also get insights into other types of behavior besides just shopping if the button could be used as a more smart home and kitchen interface.

At some point down the road Amazon may move on from the Button. After all, they are increasingly moving Dash into devices and, now that they are giving the Wand second life with a refresh and access to the entire Amazon catalog, they may see Dash itself – or maybe they’ve always seen it this way – as a stop gap.

But the button lover in me isn’t worried since, after all, there are other do-anything buttons out there. And who knows, maybe after a while I’ll get the hang of this voice interface thing after all.

Image credit: Dan Malouf

The Best Alexa Skills For Your Smart Kitchen

The Amazon Echo has become almost synonymous with kitchen tech – with the grocery list assistance and Amazon Prime ordering capabilities, early adopters of the voice assistant Bluetooth speaker set Echo right on their countertops. Amazon has done a nice job making sure that the Echo’s open API means just about anyone can develop a third-party skill for the device. So far that’s led to thousands of skills, with varying degrees of usefulness.

But what about skills for the actual kitchen? While there’s no shortage of smart home skills for the Echo, the functionality for the kitchen isn’t as robust just yet. But there are a handful of skills, both native and third-party, that can make cooking and eating a little bit easier. The Amazon Echo app lists close to 100 skills in the Food & Drink category alone – though many of them have one star and bad reviews. Some enable helpful resources like how to bake a cupcake or the right amount of time to store certain foods in the fridge. But others, like the “Sourdough” skill – dedicated to making different variations of sourdough bread, seem more trivial.

We’ve culled the list of kitchen-related Alexa skills and made a list of the ones that seem most useful to help consumers get the most out of Echo and turn the device into an on-demand sous chef or bartender. We’ll continue to update as the list grows!

Recipes Skills

Food Network
Alexa, send me the recipe I saw on The Pioneer Woman yesterday.
The Food Network is the first major cuilnary network to join forces with Amazon Echo to deliver a unique skill. At a basic level, you can ask Alexa what time your favorite cooking shows are going to air – but even better, she can give you the recipes that you saw on those shows to make in your own kitchen. Now if she could only bring Top Chef contestants to your door via Uber.

Campbell’s Kitchen
Alexa, ask Campbell’s Kitchen what’s for dinner
Campbell’s is the first and only Big Food manufacturer to take advantage of Alexa’s presence in the kitchen to make recipe suggestions. Of course, Campbell’s wants you to center your meals around their products, but attempts to make dinnertime easy with a daily list of five recipes.

CookBook
Alexa, ask cookbook how to (make what you to eat for your meal)
This skill is the most intriguing in the recipe category as it not only gives you the ingredients and steps to cook your chosen meal, it will also read back the recipe to you as you prepare your food. Arguably the hands-free functionality of Amazon’s AI interface is one of the most compelling use cases for the device.

Meal Idea
Alexa, ask meal idea to give me some meal ideas
The verbal activation of this skill is redundant, but the premise behind this skill is solid. Stumped about what to make for dinner? Tell Alexa what you’ve got on hand and she will suggest some recipes. Helpful during meal prep or while making your grocery list for the week.

Alcoholic Beverages

The Bartender
Alexa, ask the bartender, what’s in a [Tom Collins]?
This skill gives Alexa access to over ten thousand cocktail recipes and instructions on how to make them. Use this to impress your friends at a dinner party or to try out new drinks after a long day at work.

MySomm
Alexa, recommend a wine for a roast chicken.
Ever wanted to be friends with a wine expert? The MySomm skill gives you your own personal sommelier who can make hundreds of recommendations based on what food you’re eating. Good for when you’re having company or when you’ve cooked a nice family meal and want the perfect drink to pair.

What Beer
Alexa, ask what beer goes with a burger?
What Beer is like MySomm, but for beer. You can ask What Beer for pairs of hundreds of food items, mostly common meals like burgers, fish, steak and desserts.

Cooking Assistance

Meat Thermometer
Alexa, ask Meat Thermometer what is the best temperature for veal?
We won’t address the fact that you’re cooking veal – aka baby cow – for dinner. Instead we’ll say that this tool is incredibly helpful if you’re waiting for something to finish cooking to a safe temperature before you remove it from its heating source. Turkey, chicken, fish – you name it, Meat Thermometer can tell you the exact temp for safe eating.

Measurements
Alexa, how many tablespoons are in one cup?
This is a native Alexa skill and one that demonstrates the real use case for a voice assistant in the kitchen. Basic questions while you’re cooking can be answered, the info given in an instant and saving you from cleaning your hands, pulling out your phone and searching the internet for the right answer.

Timer
Alexa, set a timer for 30 minutes.
Also a native Alexa skill but another handy tool that you can use for almost any meal. If you’ve got more than one thing on the stove, in the oven or on the grill and you’re trying to monitor them all, it’s helpful to have more than one timer. Also if you’re using the Echo to listen to podcasts or music or the news while you cook, it will interrupt the entertainment to let you know time is up.

Caloric Intake
Alexa, how many calories in a package of Oreos?
A lot – you probably don’t need Alexa to tell you that. But a helpful tool for meal prep and general nutritional guidelines as you plan what to eat and try to stay healthy.

So there you have it – a list of the most helpful Alexa kitchen & food skills. We’ll update this list from time to time as new skills are developed and Alexa becomes an even more helpful sous chef. Stay tuned.