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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Bixby

SideChef Launches Guided Cooking Integration With Bixby, Samsung’s AI Assistant

This week, SideChef announced an integration with Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant Bixby. The partnership centers around the launch of a voice-activated guided cooking capsule (capsules are Samsung’s equivalent to Amazon Alexa skills) which will give users of Bixby-powered mobile phones access to approximately 15 thousand recipes, most with step-by-step video-powered cooking instructions.

From the news release:

“Users can hone in on the exact recipe they would like by adding natural language constraints, such as dietary restriction, cuisine type, and even specific ingredients. Once a recipe is selected, SideChef provides video instruction through Bixby to guide home cooks through the entire recipe preparation process, from start to finish.”

While Samsung’s voice assistant doesn’t quite have the same degree of loyal usership as, say, Google Assistant on mobile phones or Amazon Alexa in the home, it is installed on a whole lot of Samsung products. Last year Samsung CEO D.J. Koh declared that the company’s AI assistant could reach a total of 500 million devices if it were to be installed on every Samsung device.

Of course, to reach that massive audience, SideChef’s new capsule would then have to be installed by the consumer, who will be able to find it on the Bixby Marketplace (Samsung’s “app store” for Bixby Capsules). Samsung launched the marketplace in mid-2019, and the newness of the store may actually play to SideChef’s advantage as theirs is probably one of the few recipe-centric voice apps and most likely the only guided cooking capsule on the still relatively bare shelves of the Bixby marketplace.

This move comes a year after SideChef launched on Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa devices, the Alexa Echo Show and Echo Spot, and just a couple months after the smart kitchen software startup announced an integration with Haier’s smart fridges at IFA 2019. While it isn’t immediately clear if the Bixby integration will put SideChef on Samsung Family Hub refrigerators, I would expect that will happen sooner rather than later.

Finally, while SideChef continues to rack up appliance partnerships, the company is also beginning to explore partnerships with big CPG brands. Last month the startup partnered with Bacardi through its Alexa integration to enable step-by-step drink mixing.  This trend of food brands integrating with smart kitchen software platforms isn’t limited to SideChef, as SideChef competitor Innit announced a partnership in September with Mars through a Google Lens integration that will enable both guided cooking and personalized meal and nutrition recommendations.

Samsung Adds Food Image Recognition To Bixby Through Calorie Mama API

Search has come a long way since the earliest algorithms deployed by Google, Lycos, and Inktomi. After conquering basic and complex queries, search engines set their sites on images, video, and audio as frontiers that required new ways of looking at metadata to provide consumers with useful results.

Image recognition has been a focus of developers wanting to add value to the basic ability to capture and identify a picture of a peach or a fast food meal at Wendy’s. The key, as exemplified by companies such as Palo Alto-based Azumio, is to link image recognition to valuable datasets. For Azumio’s Calorie Mama AI-powered platform, the company offers an API available for third-party developers as well as a consumer download which allows users to track nutrition intake.

While Azumio faces competition from Google and Pinterest, a new partnership with Samsung may allow the folks behind Calorie Mama to separate itself from the pack. Samsung has announced a working relationship with Azumio to adds its Calorie Mama technology to Bixby, the South Korean giant’s AI personal assistant platform. Calorie Mama will be baked into the new Galaxy S9 and S9+ enabling users to obtain instant nutritional information about the food they eat.

“Our vision for the Calorie Mama API is to provide the best food image recognition technology to our partners,” Tom Xu, co-founder of Azumio said in a press release, “and to simplify nutrition tracking and food discovery for healthy living to their customers.”

While this announcement is a nice to have for Samsung smart device users, the true value goes far beyond the basic ability to count calories and set nutrition goals. Azumio’s work primarily is focused in areas related to health in such areas as diabetes and sleep disorders. The company’s Argus platform offers activity and diet tracking along with a social network focused on health and fitness. Argus powers its suite of applications such as Instant Heart Rate, Sleep Time, Fitness Buddy and Glucose Buddy.  The endgame of connecting food recognition with health-related applications, focusing on those in which diet management is essential, is where the real power lies.

Samsung and Azumio’s combined efforts began in 2013 when the Argus platform was offered in Samsung’s Gear line of devices. Samsung continues to work on its own proprietary health and fitness apps, but those have not been offered to consumers outside of Korea. The value of adding Calorie Mama to Bixby could show great promise. For example, a cook wanting to create a healthy meal could ask Bixby to recommend a substitute for a high-fat ingredient by tapping into its database of image data.

Pinterest—which is preparing for a possible IPO—will undoubtedly rise to the challenge to go beyond its image recognition work with Google (called Lens) which allows users to find recipe pins based on captured pictures. Pinterest recently has hired a new head of computer vision, Chuck Rosenberg, a 14-year Google veteran. Given the primary task of computer vision technology is to analyze images and tie those results to associated data, Pinterest is on an accelerated path in this space. Unlike Samsung, working in a somewhat closed ecosystem, Pinterest will make its application available to all takers.

The Smart Home Weekly: HomeKit’s Big Week & The Debut of HomePod

Each week I look at the biggest story in smart home and give context to what’s happening in the connected home around the web.

This was the most important week for HomeKit since Apple announced it in June 2014.

That’s because, on Monday the company announced a host of critical updates to their smart home protocol and, just as importantly, launched their new wireless smart speaker/HomeKit hub, the HomePod.

Long rumored, the HomePod is what most of us thought it would be: a wireless speaker with built-in Siri. But with this announcement, Apple filled in many of the holes and showed us exactly how they plan to fight back against Amazon and Google in the digital home.

One thing is clear: Apple is leading with music, telling us that the HomePod will revolutionize home music. With HomePod and the launch of AirPlay 2 with multiroom audio, Apple is going directly after the Sonos consumer.  The device, which costs $349, is an impressive piece of hardware, with seven tweeters, six microphones for far-field listening and its own A8 processor.

It was also a big week for HomeKit. Apple’s long-gestating smart home protocol had its biggest week since it debuted at WWDC in 2014. And while the HomePod – a dedicated HomeKit hub – was the main attraction of the day, Apple made some important announcements about HomeKit itself:

Software authentication – At WWDC this week, Apple indicated they will now allow HomeKit hardware makers to create products without the dedicated chip. This is important because one of the reasons the slow rollout of HomeKit was the requirement of an MFI security chip in each HomeKit device. All that said, given Apple’s strong focus on security, there’s no doubt that the new software authentication will be very robust and HomeKit partners will have to work hard to get software-based authentication through the HomeKit certification process.

NFC and QR code pairing: Apple wants to make HomeKit set up experience easier. NFC and QR code pairing will go a long way towards doing just that.

HomeKit is opening up to anyone with developers license: Before this move, a company had to be a member of Apple’s MFI third party hardware program. Now, Apple is opening the doors to HomeKit to anyone who is an Apple developer. This will greatly increase the number of smart people innovating around the framework.

The Smart Home Show

This week’s episode of the Smart Home Show is all about Apple’s HomePod and HomeKit. Have a listen below:

New From Around The (Smart Home) Web:

Samsung Combo Wireless Mesh Router/SmartThings Hub Available for Pre-Order: Samsung put its mesh router/Smart Things hub up for preorder. The new Connect Home comes with a built in SmartThings hub with Z-Wave and Zigbee radios and built-in mesh Wi-Fi. At this point, the mesh Wi-Fi market is becoming crowded, but the combo of smart home hub and mesh is a nice differentiator for Samsung and makes them comparable in feature set to to the Almond 3 mesh router/smart home hub.

Unikey Gets More $: One of the original Bluetooth smart lock technology providers, Unikey, has received another round of funding, bringing in $5 million from two private equity firms, adding to other strategic investors such as Samsung Ventures. What’s interesting here is the company looks like they’re going to use the capital to expand further into the pro/commercial lock space and new markets like automotive. When I talked to Unikey CEO Phil Dumas on the very first Smart Home Show, he talked back then about possibly expansion into automotive.

Samsung Rumored To Be Working on Smart Speaker: Of course they are. In a way, the key battle in the digital home is not for the home router or set-top box, but now its for the interface, and it seems the smart speaker is becoming the default form factor and device to act as that key interface. Samsung’s version of a smart speaker will be powered by Bixby, the company’s voice assistant technology. Is this a good idea? In theory. I mean, it makes sense for a company like Samsung to create their own, but as always with Samsung and the connected home its about execution.

Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

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.

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.

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