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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Projected Video Interfaces May Be The Future Of The Kitchen. Why Aren’t They Here Yet?

With all the talk about Alexa nowadays, you’d think the future has arrived and we have our interface: voice.

But before you give up all your iPads for Echo Dots, take a moment to consider how much you use touch interfaces on a daily basis. While voice will no doubt play a huge role in the future of the smart home, touch continues to proliferate. Not only are car makers adding interactive touch screens, restaurants and pretty much everywhere else we go is getting better touch interfaces, while products in our kitchen like refrigerators are getting better and better touch interfaces.

And now, touch is combining with gesture recognition in a new science-fiction spin on interfaces that is gaining favor among product designers. The ‘projected interface’ – where an image is projected onto a flat surface to make what is essentially an interactive touch screen through the use of machine vision – is a new product interface concept that has captured the imagination interface designers in the kitchen over the past few years.

Projected Interface Demos Are Everywhere

Below are a few high profile projected interface product demos rolled out over the past few years:

Whirlpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, started talking about their interactive cooktop three years ago at CES 2014. You can see in the video how the Whirlpool smart cook top utilizes projected video as an interface.

Over a year later, people were wowed by the projected interface used by IKEA in its 2025 future kitchen concept video:

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

At this year’s CES, Bosch seemed to embrace the concept of the projected interface, incorporating it into not only a demo of its coffee making robot:

Spotted at #ces2017: coffee robot at the @Bosch booth.

A video posted by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

And high-end German consumer electronics manufacturer Grundig has been showing off its VUX projection interface concept for the past year and a half:

So, why all this interest in projected video interfaces and, more importantly, why haven’t any of these “visions of the future” made it to market yet?

Why Projected Video Interfaces Are Inevitable

It’s clear why projected video is a popular concept for demos: it looks cool. The very idea of turning any flat surface into an interactive interface is one that, at least for now, wows the user. Of course, that could change over time if these interfaces become more commonplace, but isn’t that true of every new technology? For now, projected interfaces could be used in a variety of interesting ways that consumers would love.

As for appliance makers, projected interfaces present an exciting new way to create consumer experiences. Think about it: Product designers used to working with tiny screens would find a much bigger pallet in projected interfaces, allowing them to create more compelling experiences that open doors to more education, instruction, and marketing content. Projected interfaces would also allow them to refresh their product interface regularly, rather than being stuck with the same small, mono-color screen for the life of the appliance.

If It’s So Cool To Demo, Why Aren’t Projected Video Interfaces In Market Yet?

If the projected video interface is such a crowd pleaser, why does it only seem to show up in concept videos and on trade show floors in “kitchen of the future” concept demos?

Here are a few possible reasons:

It’s still early, and projected interfaces are not quite ready for prime time. Most of the demos we see are all created for highly controlled demo experiences.  It may be that making projected video interfaces work in a mass-market environment in the consumer kitchen isn’t as easy as they’ve made it look in a demo video.

Implementing projected video requires a complicated setup. The IKEA 2025 kitchen concept utilizes a “smart light” concept which would require the consumer to have a specialized projector and an intelligent camera that can then read the gestures of the consumer installed above a table.  The other demos also have separate projection systems installed above the work surface. This type of set up would mean these systems are likely expensive and require a new installation method to which appliance makers and their channels are not accustomed.

Appliance Makers Move Slow. While all of these demos make clear that the projected interface is a promising concept, it’s important to remember appliance makers don’t introduce radical new concepts quickly.

Still, I’m hopeful that maybe Whirlpool, Bosch or IKEA will introduce an actual product at next year’s CES using projected video rather than just a concept demo. I do suspect that some, if not all, of the big appliance makers, are working on productizing projected interface enabled products. I also suspect disrupters may be working on something in this area.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the world’s most disruptive company, Amazon, has something up their sleeves. After all, I keep hearing that the online giant has a bunch of crazy new products in store for us this year, so who knows, maybe the “kitchen computer” of the future is a social robot that has a projection video interface built in to go with Alexa.

To get analysis like this and to stay up to date on the future of cooking and the kitchen, subscribe to our newsletter, the Weekly Spoon. 

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. 

The Year In Smart Bar

Ah, 2016, the year we all needed to take a big ol’ drink. Fortunately a flurry of innovation in gadgets, apps, and platforms has helped make that easier in more ways than one. Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Make It From Scratch

People have been home-brewing for decades, but in the past few years it’s reached a fever pitch, with every wannabe hipster (sorry, Mike) fermenting in their basement. The Pico simplifies this process with a plug-and-play model, including ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits and the ability to brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Meanwhile Hopsy premiered its HomeTap so you can enjoy the mouthfeel of a freshly poured pint out of a tap, even if you didn’t brew the beer yourself. And just in case there’s not enough foam, get yourself the Sonic beer foamer device to add the perfect amount.

Even big players like Whirlpool entered this space in 2016: In July its crowdfunding project reached over 220 percent of its goal, and soon you’ll be able to buy the Vessi beer fermentor and dispenser for $1,800. (In other words, crowdfunding is finally legit, with Wired even profiling one of the first companies to run a successful crowdfunding campaign — for 3D-printed cocktail ice.) And foodie inventor Dave Arnold launched a crowdfunding campaign for his Spinzall, a small centrifuge designed for restaurant and home use for under $1,000.

Robotic Bartenders

The ready-to-drink (RTD) market is somewhere around $3 billion, and the hottest thing in the smart bar this year was clearly robotic bartenders. There are a spate of different companies vying for space: Bartesian raised an undisclosed sum, reportedly in the “millions”; Somabar raised $1.5 million; and Monsieur raised $1.2 million. In less professional news, the Open Bar robot was submitted to the 2016 Hackaday Prize contest and is actually open source, so all you eager coders can help perfect it.

Expect the playing field to become even more crowded in the next year with lookalike companies proving our eternal interest in robots.

Pour Yourself the Perfect Drink

Apps for the perfect cocktail, beer, and so on abounded this year. Competing with the Perfect Drink smart bartending platform, the Bernooli device and app make it easy to make a balanced drink, and even Alexa can help you figure out how to make a cocktail or give you wine recommendations. And Spanish chemists have created an app that will tell you if your beer is, for lack of a better word, skunked.

Meanwhile Hooch doesn’t want you to drink at home, alone: The company raised $1.5 million to expand its subscription platform that gives you one drink for free at bars all over New York and Los Angeles.

Totally Unnecessary Technology

What kind of year would it be without some totally ridiculous, over-the-top technology that we don’t need? A boring one, that’s what.

Enter the data cocktail machine that makes cocktails from tweets. Yes, the Arduino-powered robot pulls the latest five tweets from around the world that mention ingredients and then mashes them into a cocktail. Surprisingly, there aren’t any plans to commercialize the machine.

But who knows: 2017 is a whole new year.

Amazon Wants To Send An Assistant To Your Home. Could That Include Cooks?

Amazon is full of ideas. Some good, some bad, some even a little weird, but there’s no doubt the company never seems to run short on new business concepts.

One of these new ideas apparently has Amazon getting into the home helper business. As first reported by the Seattle Times, the company has a job posting on its website for a ‘home assistant,’ a position that would involve “working with customers each day with tidying up around the home, laundry, and helping put groceries and essentials like toilet paper and paper towels away.”

In other words, just like it sounds: a home helper.

As weird and wide-ranging as Amazon is with their moonshots, creating a home cleaning business is a bit of a stretch even for them. For that reason, it’s worth speculating (as I did over at NextMarket) about what exactly they may be up to. While there’s a good chance this may be an experiment or some form of market research, there’s an equally good chance the company is trying to create an Amazon-branded services market or a “truck roll” into the consumer’s home to help set it up on Amazon platforms like Dash.

But what if one of their ideas is to help the home CEO run their kitchen? While the list of tasks on the job posting includes things like cleaning and organizing, it doesn’t talk about cooking and with good reason: While putting away groceries is straightforward, making food requires knowledge of the unique tastes and dietary needs of a family. It also is pretty labor intensive.

Still, what if straightforward tasks like putting a pre-prepared meal in the oven became part of the portfolio of services? And, thinking higher-end, what if Amazon offered ways to match cooks with consumers in some form of home chef marketplace?

While I wouldn’t rule anything out for Amazon, I think these ideas are probably not what Amazon has in plan with its current home assistant effort. But,  given the company’s constant rollout of new ideas, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Amazon’s plans for food, cooking, and the kitchen expand in the future.