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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Echo Show

Alexa Adds Thousands Of Buzzfeed Tasty Recipes To Echo Show

This week Amazon and Buzzfeed announced a partnership that brings thousands of Buzzfeed Tasty’s famous quick-play social videos to Amazon’s video-enabled digital assistants.

According to email sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: First ask Alexa to find a recipe by saying something like, “Alexa, find pork recipes from Tasty.” Alexa will then show you options, and you can tell the device which recipe to select by saying something like, “Alexa, select recipe number three.”

From there, say, “Alexa, start recipe” and Alexa will read off each step in the recipe as well as list them on the left-hand side of the screen of the Echo Show. It will also show a looping video of the recipe on the right. You can also ask Alexa to read off ingredients by saying “Alexa, read ingredients” and add it to a shopping list by saying “Alexa, add to shopping list.”

I wish I could tell you how well it works, but at the time of this writing I couldn’t get either of my Echo Show devices to actually find Buzzfeed Tasty recipes. The new feature is supposed to be available to anyone in the U.S. with an Echo Show as of this week, so I assume I will be able to access the program over the next few days as the kinks are worked out.

Too bad, since I am very curious about how well turning a Buzzfeed Tasty recipe into a more instructional/step-by-step format on a screen will work. Like many, I’ve watched a lot of Buzzfeed recipes online but have never actually cooked to one of them, in part because they seem designed more for entertainment than to be functional. Putting them onto the Echo Show could change that, so I’ll update this post once I can actually cook with one.

One thing that struck me about this integration is that it is simply turned on and available to work (once it works) for anyone with an Echo Show. This is different from earlier Alexa Echo Show integrations like that of Allrecipes, which required the user to add as an Alexa Skill.

My suspicion is that Amazon is having trouble getting people to add new skills to their voice assistants, so at this point the company is, in some cases, just doing it for the consumer. Makes sense, actually, since a “cloud computer” like Alexa isn’t exactly short on storage. That and it just seems a bit more magical if you one day could just ask Alexa to do something and she does it rather than going through an “add skill” extra-step.

I am also curious how the “add to shopping list” feature works. This news follows an integration with Walmart (via shoppable recipe platform Northfork) that allows Tasty app users to make recipes shoppable by adding them their Walmart shopping lists and online grocery carts. The Alexa/Tasty integration doesn’t quite look like it takes recipes all the way to the Amazon cart, but if I know Amazon, I expect that will eventually change.

Bosch’s Friendly Kitchen Robot Shows Off Sous Chef Skills At IFA 2017

When Bosch showed off their kitchen assistant Mykie at last year’s IFA and a few months later at CES, the social robot did little more than project a looped video suggesting how he might help out in the kitchen.

But at this year’s IFA, the little guy seemed all grown up as he showed off a voice-powered interactive demo of guided cooking. In the video captured below, you can see the user giving voice commands to navigate Mykie from step to step, watch recipe preparation instructions, search the web and watch videos of pro cooks preparing the food.

It’s an interesting evolution of Mykie in what is fast becoming a more competitive market for AI powered sous chefs. This year we’ve seen everyone from Buzzfeed Tasty to Whirlpool join others like the Hestan Cue and Cuciniale with guided cooking platforms, while Amazon and Samsung are creating what are voice-powered kitchen computers as extensions of their existing AI and app platforms.

By giving Mykie a name and cute little robot face, Bosch is betting consumers will embrace AI assistants with a little personality. Compared with the faceless Alexa, Mykie certainly seems warmer and one that might even become something of a “friend” in the kitchen. Of course, whether we as consumers will befriend the likes of Mykie is part of a longer-term question around just how realistic home robots and AI assistants become.

Bosch representatives at IFA were still vague on when we might see Mykie make it to market. With CES in just a few months, you have to wonder if the German appliance giant will reveal details in Las Vegas about when consumers might have their own kitchen assistant with a friendly face to help them make dinner.

Curious About The Echo Show? Here’s My ‘One Day’ Review

The Echo Show arrived this week. Like many, I was excited to put the latest addition to the Echo lineup through its paces.

Welcome to my one day review.

Why write a review after using a product one day? Doesn’t one need to spend weeks – maybe even months – with a product like the Echo Show to really understand the possibilities of this complicated and interesting new product?

Yes, but here’s the thing: For most products, you also are able to notice things right away. Not unlike a first date when you show up at the restaurant and notice your date for the night has three eyebrows or is a loud talker, there are things you notice right away when you’re around someone or something.

So here goes:

Out of Box Experience

The install experience was painless, quick and well optimized. Once I pulled the Show out of the box and plugged it in, it walked (and talked) me through the installation.

The device found my Wi-Fi network, had me enter my password, and within a minute it had checked in with the cloud and knew this was Michael Wolf’s new Echo Show. The Show started to download a software update, which took about five minutes. Overall, the product was installed and running in 10 minutes.

The Sound

For about five minutes, I thought this device sounded horrible. Then I saw the layer of protective plastic over the speaker.

This is why I don’t write five minute reviews.

Plastic removed, the Echo Show sounds good. Not quite as good as my Sonos Play 3, but it could give my Play 1 a run for its money.  Turned up, the Echo Show is fairly loud.

Volume is controllable via Alexa, but it also has volume up and down buttons on top of the device, which I like. Sometimes you just like old fashioned physical buttons.

The Echo Show Shape and Look

Like many this week, I was surprised at the beefiness of the Show when it arrived at my house. This is mostly due to Amazon’s early press images and videos which showed the the latest Echo mainly from the front of the device. When you actually see the Show in all its glory, it’s a lot deeper than you expect.

So Amazon intended for you to mainly see the Show from one side: its front. This is clear not only because of how deep and heavy the back side of the Show is, but also because the sides of the device are angled inward. It reminded me of those early big screen TVs before everything became ultra-thin.

Because of these angled sides, you can walk from side to side and still have the illusion that this is a thin device. See video below:

Given the shape of the device, it works best against a wall. While I’m sure that with so many of today’s modern kitchens having islands, I’m sure many Echo Shows will end up stranded one one (sorry), but I’d suggest putting it up against a backsplash as it just looks better.

The device’s front screen leans ever-so-slightly backward. When I pushed the device with my hand and tried to tip it over from the front, it stuck stubbornly in place. It’s clear that Amazon gave some thought to how this device would sit on a surface like a kitchen counter as people and things moved around it and possibly bump into it.

Visual Information + Voice = Game Changer

Here’s something I realized right away: By finally giving Alexa a screen, Amazon has opened up immense new possibilities for potential applications and content opportunities.

This may sound like an overstatement, but it isn’t.

The main reason for this is the powerful combination of synchronized voice control/visual information. While the Amazon visual skill cupboard is slightly bare at this point, you can see from what few samples there are that by adding visual information, Amazon’s created a new and exciting direction for the Echo.

I spent the most time with new Allrecipes visual skill. While the skill feels very much like a 1.0 effort (I’ll have a review of the Allrecipes skill soon), but I can nonetheless see the potential. I was able to bring up recipes, pick one I like, browse the ingredients and cooking instructions.

But the coolest feature of the Allrecipes app was the ability to play and pause videos.  This is really important because if you’re like me, you like to watch and rewatch videos as you move through the cook process.

At the risk of being repetitive, let me say it again: it’s this combination of voice search and command with visually rich information in a shared-screen computing device is by far the most exciting thing about the Echo Show.

There are other aspects about having an always on screen that are important. The “sleep screen” info on the Echo Show is unobtrusive, natural and well placed. Maybe because Amazon has had so much practice creating sleep screen content  with the Kindle, but it’s clear Amazon thought about placing interesting and relevant info on a device. With the Echo Show, the device not only shows basic temperature and time info, but it scrolls through headlines, suggestions for using, etc.

The Camera

Of course, the camera’s most obvious benefit is the ability to communicate with others via voice chat. While I haven’t done a drop-in with my own Show yet, I did try it out in store at Amazon Books and the video quality seems really good.

Less obvious is the camera is being used as a sensor. When I turn out the lights the screen soon goes into soft-light mode, which I thought was a nice feature. And while it is early days for the Show, I expect at some point Amazon will unlock other computer vision capabilities that could really unlock contextually relevant information.

“I Would Use That”

When it comes to Alexa and our first two Echo devices, let’s just say my wife Tiffany has been indifferent to annoyed. Sure, she’ll ask Alexa to play music, but for the most part doesn’t see the value.

But after a few minutes playing with Echo Show, she was sold.

She tried out the Allrecipes app. She searched for a recipe and tried the video feature and liked it. She started, paused, played a video of making a strawberry smoothie, something my daughter wanted to make.

After a few minutes, my wife said, “this is something I would use.”

And of course, she then suggested I get rid of another one of my kitchen gadgets taking up counter space in order to put this one in the kitchen.

But hey, progress, right?

The Battle For The ‘Kitchen Screen’ Has Just Begun. Here’s The Leading Contenders

Back in the year 2000, the world’s first Internet-connected refrigerator was introduced. Made by LG, the Digital DIOS came with a webcam, an Ethernet port and perhaps most importantly, an LCD touchscreen.

The fridge was one of the first examples of an appliance with a digital screen created specifically for the consumer kitchen, but with a $20 thousand price tag, consumers stayed away.  Today, nearly two decades after the introduction of the world’s first smart fridge, some of the world’s biggest consumer electronics companies are rushing to put screens back into the kitchen again.

Why now? There are a few reasons, but most come back to one simple truth: today’s kitchen is becoming the home’s central gathering place, where people not only come to make meals but also to hang out with friends, pay bills or do homework. In other words, the kitchen has become the modern home’s ‘everything room’, and unlike the family room where a TV or family computer often resides, there’s no defined product today in the kitchen that’s accepted as the go-to screen for family members to share information, manage home systems, keep tabs on things and communicate with one another.

Not that some companies aren’t trying. Here’s a look at the leading contenders:

Refrigerators

With ample flat surface space and usually centered in the middle of the kitchen, you can see why appliance makers see the fridge as the logical place to put a big digital screen. And unlike past efforts where companies would sometimes slap a screen on a fridge with limited functionality, today’s smart fridges have big, high-definition LED touch screens. The Samsung Family Hub’s screen is 21.5″, while LG’s Smart Instaview refrigerator has a huge 29″ screen.

Pros: The main advantage of having the refrigerator act as a family’s community screen is the simple fact the fridge has long served as the home’s de facto analog bulletin board, where families stick shopping lists, family pictures, and calendars. Given what seems a natural progression for the fridge to become the home’s digital command center, it’s no surprise companies have been pursuing the idea of the smart fridge for two decades.

Cons: The biggest challenge fridges face in becoming the main ‘family screen’ is simple: these are devices that are meant to stay in a house for ten years or more. This long lifespan is much different from traditional computing devices, such as mobile phones or tablets, which typically have much faster replacement cycles.  Consumers plopping down $2,500 for the latest fridge are going to want their new device to last for at least a decade, no matter how smart they are when they purchase them.

Smart Assistants

Though the Amazon Echo is only a couple years old, its success has create a whole new category of devices alternatively called ‘smart speakers’ or ‘virtual assistants’ (for our purposes I’ll call them ‘smart assistants’, since not all are speakers and the hardware part beyond the voice assistant is hardly virtual).

And now, the company’s new Echo Show represents an entirely new and exciting direction, with a 7″ touch screen and a new visual skill API that allows third party developers to create skills that leverage visual information such as live stream video from a networked camera or cooking videos from Twitch.

And let’s not forget HelloEgg, a smart assistant with an embedded visual display designed specifically for the kitchen created by a company called RND64 that is expected to ship this year.

Pros: Unlike a heavy appliance like a fridge, smart assistant products can be purchased and installed anywhere on a countertop.  In a way, they’re like a highly optimized tablet, but instead of being a personal computing device they’re created to act as a shared screen. In many ways, the Echo Show is Amazon’s concept of a kitchen computer.

Cons: The touchscreen enabled smart assistant category is just simply too new to know how well it will do with consumers. While the Amazon Echo and other smart assistant products are no doubt becoming popular, it’s just a little soon to see how popular smart assistants with touchscreen will be.

Kitchen Counters And Flat Surfaces

The concept of using the kitchen counter as a Minority Report like interactive touch screen has been bouncing around in future-forward design studios for much of the past decade and, in the past couple years, big kitchen electronics makers like Whirlpool have even toyed with the idea of the countertop touch screen.

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

Pros: First and foremost, the idea of your surface as interactive computing screen is just cool. It also offers an extremely flexible and dynamic format to display information and adjust to specific design needs of a kitchen.

Cons: While the idea has been floating around and touted by such big brands like Whirlpool and IKEA, a projected surface touchscreen has yet to roll out in any significant way in a mass market consumer product.

Kitchen-Centric PCs

For a hot moment back in 2008-9, some in the computer industry decided that since people spend lots of time in the kitchen, they should create a line of Kitchen PCs. The idea wasn’t altogether bad since, in some ways, was a predecessor concept to the Echo Show since these products centered around the early touchscreen Windows PCs. But not surprisingly, the late aughts “kitchen PC” movement fizzled out as quickly as it started.

Pros: The idea of a kitchen computer with a touchscreen is not a bad idea, and lots of people actually have their PCs in the kitchen.

Cons: These devices were just Windows PCs with touchscreens that were very much a product of 2009.

The Microwave Oven

The fridge isn’t the only device where a screen could reside. In fact, a decade ago appliance giant Whirlpool toyed around with the concept of putting a TV screen on a microwave oven. While they never rolled the product out to market, others have since toyed around with the idea.

Games Console Microwave

Pros: Some appliances, like the microwave, are nearly as prevalent as refrigerators. Chances are a touchscreen enabled microwave would likely be much less expensive than a smart fridge.

Cons: At this point, I know of no product company that is considering a smart microwave, perhaps because of the complications of sticking a flat screen computing device on the front of a microwave. Not to say someone couldn’t surprise me, but this one seems to be the domain of tinkerers and video-bloggers at this point.

Bottom line, we’re likely to see many more screens in the kitchen in coming years. Unlike the personal computing devices most of us carry in our pockets or backpacks, these “kitchen screen” will be tailored for shared use and act as a modern equivalent of family bulletin board/digital command center for the modern home.

The only open question is exactly which device will it be.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is around the corner. Get your ticket today before early bird ticket pricing before it expires to make sure you are the the one and only event focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

As Others Play Voice Catch Up, Amazon Turns Sights To Computer Vision

As everyone from Microsoft to Apple rolls out first-generation voice assistants for the home, the reigning voice control champ Amazon has turned its attention to a new area within the smart home AI universe: computer vision.

For evidence of this focus, one needs to look no further than two new products introduced by Amazon in the past month. While both the Echo Look and Show have the same built-in voice assistant power of Alexa as their predecessors, there is one big difference: both new entrants have cameras. And while Amazon hasn’t come out and said these two new devices are the beginning of a new strategic front in the AI-powered smart home, an examination of these products’ capabilities, recent efforts to bolster the AWS AI lineup and recent statements by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos help to connect all the dots.

Rekognizing A Pattern

So why the sudden interest in putting cameras in the home?  My guess is it’s in part due to what has been a growing emphasis over the past year by Amazon on its own computer vision powered AI capabilities.

That growing interest became more evident a year ago with the acquisition of Orbeus, the company which provided the foundation for Amazon’s current computer vision service from AWS, Rekognition. According to Richard Michael, former COO, Orbeus provided a “proprietary cloud based image analysis solution that makes sense of not just faces, but also scenes and objects”.

By last October, the company had relaunched the Rekognition service as part of its suite of AWS AI products. In a blog post, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr described how Rekognition could be used:

If you have a large collection of photos, you can tag and index them using Amazon Rekognition. Because Rekognition is a service, you can process millions of photos per day without having to worry about setting up, running, or scaling any infrastructure. You can implement visual search, tag-based browsing, and all sorts of interactive discovery models.

You can use Rekognition in several different authentication and security contexts. You can compare a face on a webcam to a badge photo before allowing an employee to enter a secure zone. You can perform visual surveillance, inspecting photos for objects or people of interest or concern.

You can build “smart” marketing billboards that collect demographic data about viewers.

While Amazon hasn’t come out and announced that Rekognition is being used to power the Echo Look, the company’s “fashion assistant,” the features of the Look tells me it most likely is. The device, which lets users take selfies and build a “style book” which the Look will then analyze to make recommendations, has a feature called Style Check:

Style Check keeps your look on point using advanced machine learning algorithms and advice from fashion specialists. Submit two photos for a second opinion on which outfit looks best on you based on fit, color, styling, and current trends. Over time, these decisions get smarter through your feedback and input from our team of experienced fashion specialists.

This is exactly what the Rekognition API does. By combining machine learning with computer vision, Rekognition is constantly learning, ultimately becoming better and better at analyzing images based on an ever-growing set of data based on those images. For the Echo Look, the end result is better recommendations. And while this is a fashion-centric use case that focused on color, style and fit, there’s no doubt that this technology can be used in a variety of use cases ranging of from home security to analyzing the contents of a refrigerator.

And what about the Echo Show? While Amazon doesn’t highlight the Show’s image recognition capabilities, my guess is that Amazon will give the Show Rekognition-powered computer vision over time to add enhanced functionality.

A “Horizontal Enabling Layer”

Recent comments from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos helps one understand the company’s ongoing effort to push AI services beyond just Alexa. In a recent interview at the Internet Association gala, he shared his thoughts on AI (per GeekWire):

“Machine learning and AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It will empower and improve every business, every government organization, every philanthropy — basically, there’s no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning. At Amazon, some of the things we’re doing are superficially obvious, and they’re interesting, and they’re cool. And you should pay attention. I’m thinking of things like Alexa and Echo, our voice assistant, I’m thinking about our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones. Those things use a tremendous amount of machine learning, machine vision systems, natural language understanding and a bunch of other techniques”.

“But those are kind of the showy ones. I would say, a lot of the value that we’re getting from machine learning is actually happening beneath the surface. It is things like improved search results. Improved product recommendations for customers. Improved forecasting for inventory management. Literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface.”

While Bezos points to the voice assistant tech in Alexa and Echo, he also gives a nod to machine vision. He describes all of these technologies as a “horizontal enabling layer.” What does he mean by this? In short, he is describing AI as a technology that is broadly applicable to almost every application, whether enterprise or consumer, and how the addition of which can add immense value to the end product.

With Alexa, Amazon was able to show, not tell, about that value of voice control. That is very powerful. I am sure they hope that, in a similar way, the Echo Look and Show can act as ambassadors for computer vision to the broader world. And while we may not witness the same kind of explosive adoption of Amazon powered computer vision AI as we did with Alexa,  in part because there are already a number of products that do basic image analysis using AI (such as Closeli) in the market, I do believe that Amazon can raise the awareness about how image recognition and detection AI enhance a variety of smart home and consumer use-cases.

Can Amazon Overcome The Creep Factor?

One last caveat: inward facing cameras in the home have plateaued in recent years, while outward facing security cameras like the Ring and Arlo have flown off shelves. The reason for this is people want to know what’s going on outside their home, but they don’t want people – including potential hackers – seeing what’s going on inside. With all the stories of security vulnerabilities, who can blame them?

While Amazon seems unbothered by this, it remains to be seen if their new interest in video AI will see any pushback from consumers.

Only time – and maybe Alexa – will tell.

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….