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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Google Assistant

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.

Amazon May Grab Food Tech Headlines, but You Should Be Paying More Attention to Google

Amazon grabs a lot of attention when it comes to food tech. And rightly so, as the company bought Whole Foods, offers grocery delivery, is revolutionizing convenience stores, and so much more. But perhaps it should be its rival, Google, that we pay more attention to.

Google may not immediately spring to mind when you think of food, but the tech giant has been steadily adding features to its apps throughout the first half of this year. When you lay them out on the page, it becomes pretty apparent that Google has quietly becoming a food tech giant with a growing power that’s shaping where and how we eat.

Let’s take a look at the more recent food-related features Google has launched. So far in 2019, it has:

This doesn’t even take into consideration the work Google researchers are doing with robotics in the kitchen!

In the age of the attention economy, it’s not that hard to understand why Google busily adding more food related features to its roster. Everyone, everywhere eats. If it can make that eating more “frictionless,” to borrow a Silicon valley phrase, then you are more likely to stay in Google’s ecosystem. The more you use Google, the more data they collect from you to make more apps that, in the company’s mind, will make eating out, or order in, better (and make Google more money).

A lot of these features are just natural extensions of tasks we are already doing. Google Assistant is an assistant, having an AI act like one to make reservations (even with its ethical complications) on your behalf is the logical evolution of that product. If you’re searching for a restaurant online then it’s a pretty good bet that you want to either eat there or get food delivered from there, so why not surface popular dishes and provide a delivery option.

Amazon may dominate our online shopping and most headlines, but a lot of what they are doing is vertically integrated: they own the grocery store, the online shopping all the way down to the delivery. (Though businesses like AWS certainly help food tech startups operate and it has recently invested in Deliveroo .)

Google is embedding itself further up the stack closer to our actual decision making. This gives it a much bigger and more direct influence over how we will eat. If you’re searching for the next big player in Food Tech, you don’t have to Google it.

Hey! Google Search, Maps and Assistant Apps Now Help Deliver Your Meals

Google announced yesterday that you can now order food directly through its Search, Maps and Assistant apps. The new functionality integrates with food-ordering services like DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow, and more are scheduled to follow.

When using Google Maps or Search to find a restaurant, look for the “Order Online” button that ow appears with the results. If a restaurant is participating, you then choose the delivery service, as well as pick up or delivery times.

If you’re using Google Assistant, you say “Hey Google, order food from [restaurant].” And if you’ve ordered a certain meal through one of the delivery partners before, you can say “Hey Google, reorder food from [restaurant],” and your past orders surfaced for you to select again.

Google says the new functionality is available now in thousands of cities across the U.S. The company’s blog post only mentions using your phone, and the animated gifs embedded are all screenshots of a phone in action, so it’s not clear whether food ordering works with other Google Assistant platforms like the Google Hub or other smart displays.

Google’s direct integration with food delivery apps is also further recognition that restaurant delivery is here to stay, and is only going to get bigger. This news comes just a day after DoorDash announced that it had raised another $600 million in funding, indicating investors are still bullish on delivery’s future.

Google’s official mission may be “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” but lately it seems like the company is more interested in helping you eat faster. Yesterday’s announcement means you don’t have to take an extra step of opening delivery apps like DoorDash on your phone when searching for a meal. The company has also released its AI (for the most part) assistant, Duplex, which makes restaurant reservations for you. And if that weren’t enough, Google Wing has gotten approval to make drone deliveries, which are bound to include things like lattes by air.

Orderscape Is Making Voice-Order Tech Ridiculously Simple for Restaurants

The restaurant industry has always been notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. But when it comes to voice-ordering tech, you can hardly blame them. As a concept, the idea of voice-enabling your menu — that is, making it possible to search for and order food from your restaurant via the likes of Google Assistant or Alexa — is unique and exciting. As a reality, however, restaurants have to develop and build out as another sales channel, voice is complex, expensive, and time-consuming — or in the words of Orderscape’s CEO, Michael Atkinson, “It’s overwhelming and God-awful.”

He should know. Having worked with restaurant tech for the last 14 years, Atkinson understands both the technical and operational challenges involved with bringing voice technology into restaurants. The hope is that Orderscape, which he founded in 2016 with Ted Cohn, will not just address some of these issues but also make it ridiculously simple for restaurants to add voice-enabled search and commerce as another sales channel — something that will become a competitive differentiator sooner than most of us think.

Orderscape makes a voice-ordering software layer that works with browsers, mobile phones and watches as well as smart speakers like Alexa. And as of last week, the company launched a large-scale voice-enabled search capability for around 50,000 menus on Google Assistant and Alexa. (Right now, it’s voice-only, with no display capability.)

To be clear, Orderscape isn’t actually in charge of creating or updating the menus. Rather, the company partners with restaurant platforms like Olo, Onosys, and Monkey Media, all of whom have been powering restaurants’ systems for years and are responsible for the content. “The way we work, our platform originates an order through voice. And then we use our algorithms to convert it from voice to digital, then we send those orders to our partners, who are connected to the restaurant POS,” Atkinson told me.

Orderscape also doesn’t take users to a specific restaurant, but instead tells users where their desired food item is available in their area. So, for example, telling Google Assistant, “I want a grilled cheese” will pull up relevant results at Denny’s as well as the local diner. From there, the customer can, according to Atkinson, “get more granular” and specify place, special instructions, etc.

But, as I said earlier, it’s complicated. Restaurant menus don’t automatically wind up on Google Assistant or Alexa. In fact, to activate a voice capability skill, a restaurant would have to create a voice user experience (VUI), a food-specific taxonomy (will it be called “pop” or “soda”?), then connect those elements to voice inputs, called “gateways,” like Alexa or Google.

With Orderscape, that work is already taken care of, which means a restaurant can get a menu voice-activated with zero disruption. There’s no installation, no training, no downtime. Orderscape simply gets permission from the restaurant to use its menu, ingests the information via an existing parter like Olo, and voice-enables the menu. “All the hard work has been done by portals and platforms,” says Atkinson.

This is potentially a huge selling point for Orderscape, and something that could go far in appeasing restaurants’ well-founded fears around adding yet-another technology to the mix. Right now, general managers are basically having to act as IT people for their restaurants. The appeal of Orderscape is that it may be a complex technology, but the restaurants won’t see that. As Atkinson says, “What we’ve done is try to take all the burden and hassle out of the restaurant side.”

Next up for Orderscape is to release a commerce version of its voice tech, which Atkinson says will drop towards the end of Q2 2019. This will mean users can not just search but also complete an entire transaction, right down to whether they want delivery or pickup, using Orderscape via Google Assistant. That whole image of being able to lie on your couch and shout instructions at a device, moving only to answer the door when the food arrives, is a fast-approaching reality.

Because of that, Atkinson’s quick to emphasize the need for restaurants to act now in terms of hopping the voice train. According to him, voice-enabled tech will explode over the next 12 to 18 months, and “2019 is the year everyone needs to get it together.”

This “getting it together” probably involves a little more than simply taking a phone call to grant Orderscape permission to ingest your menu. But not much, if my conversation with Atkinson is anything to go by. At the very least, it’ll be one less technology the GM has to grapple with during a busy dinner rush.

Lifesum Unveils a Google Assistant Version of Its Health-Tracking App

It being the time of year when most of us set some health-related goals, Lifesum picked an apt time to unveil its latest offering. Yesterday, the Swedish company officially unveiled a Google Assistant version of its nutrition app, which allows users to track meals, weight, and water intake using their voice instead of a phone or watch.

The Lifesum app, which has already amassed a large following for its Android and iOS versions, uses a combination of data and motivational psychology to help users track their food intake and meet goals around their health, like losing 10 pounds or learning to like broccoli. Upon signing up, users take a brief test to help them choose an appropriate diet plan (e.g., keto, high protein, etc.), then track protein, fat, and carb intake for each meal via the app. A weekly score tells the user how on-track their food consumption is with their set goals, and offers tips for improvement. At just over $3/month, it’s also a pretty good bargain for the number of features you get.

The obvious plus of combining an app like this with Google Assistant is that one need not pull out their phone and input every single meal or glass of water they want to track. You simply tell Assistant to talk to Lifesum when you want to log items. The Lifesum app will also issue challenges based on a location you give it (this is completely opt-in). If you’re in your kitchen, for example, it might tell you to hide sugary foods.

That said, Lifesum’s Google Assistant app isn’t yet as robust as we expect it to become in future. Right now it’s really more of a companion to the mobile versions of the app. You can tell Google Assistant to track meals, but to record the specific foods and other details, you’ll have to go into your phone later. So for now, at least, the Lifesum app simply acts as a placeholder. If you don’t have time to record all the details of your enormous supper directly after the meal, you can just say “track a large dinner,” then fill in the details once you have time. Also, since Google Assistant’s usefulness varies based on location, using the Lifesum app in certain scenarios, like a loud restaurant, would be difficult.

The global fitness app market is predicted to grow to $2 billion by 2023. Lifesum raised $10 million in 2016, and there’s a lot of other capital going around this space. Nutrition and fitness training app Freeletics closed a $45 million Series A funding round in December. MyFitnessPal, who was acquired by Under Armour back in 2015, is another popular food- and fitness-tracking app out there.

Lifesum for Google Assistant is only available in English at the moment. The company indicates it will eventually bring full functionality to the Assistant app, and welcomes suggestions for features from current users.

I’m not sure how useful this version of the app is right now, given its current limitations and the fact that it’s not that hard to take your phone out of your pocket and put some numbers in. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see some companies experimenting with how voice command can play a role in keeping track of what you eat and setting realistic goals around that.

Innit Partners With Tyson To Bring Packaged Food Giant Into The Smart Kitchen

By selling one in every five pounds of chicken, beef or pork in the US, it’s safe to say that Tyson Foods is responsible for a whole bunch of the food that goes onto consumer plates.

And now, if smart kitchen platform company Innit has its way, consumers will soon be cooking all that meat (and maybe eventually some of the lab-grown stuff) with the help of QR codes, Google smart displays and connected appliances.

That’s the vision anyway that will be on display this weekend in New York City as the company demos an integration developed by Tyson at the Food Loves Tech conference. According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company will show off its integration with GE ovens and a Google smart display.

The demo will start “with a QR code on a package of Tyson protein, connecting via Google Assistant to Innit, and sending an expert cook program to a GE oven (that is) tailored to that SKU,” said Brown via email.

It makes sense that Innit, who has been busy partnering with big appliance brands like GE, LG and Electrolux over the past year, now has its sights set on packaged food brands. The company, which acquired Shopwell in 2017 and recently relaunched that platform at Smart Kitchen Summit, has a huge database of CPG information that it can tie directly to optimized recipes.

As for Tyson, partnering with a company like Innit makes sense as well. Through Innit’s integration with Google Assistant, packaged food brands like Tyson can get recipes and integrated advertising onto what is a rapidly growing installed base of smart displays. This deal could also allow them to create cook instructions optimized for specific appliance brands (350 degrees in a GE oven might be slightly different than 350 degrees in LG or Whirlpool) and have them sent directly to the oven.

The news caps off a busy time for Innit. Not only did they launch their app into the UK this past week, they will also unveil the first fruits of their partnership with small appliance division of Philips. The company will show how a Phillips air fryer is discoverable within the My Appliances section of the Innit app and how a home cook has access to “appliance-aware modular meals with video guidance on how to use the appliance,” according to Brown.

Stepping back, the move to integrate packaged food providers into the connected kitchen marks a step forward in the space as companies like Innit try to tie together the various pieces of the cooking journey. At the Smart Kitchen Summit last month, one of the issues brought up on stage was the need for greater connections between the various platforms to enable more seamless digital-powered cooking experiences. While fragmentation isn’t going away anytime soon, the connection between food and appliance is an important one and it will be interesting to see if other big CPG brands get on board with the connected kitchen.

Google’s Geoff Barnes on the Complexity and Potential of Voice Assistants

In the past few years, voice assistants have been playing an increasing role in the meal journey. Take Google, for example; its voice assistant has developed a guided cooking platform, made integration partnerships with big appliance brands, and even added the ability to make eerily realistic-sounding restaurant reservations.

As a Senior Interaction Designer for Google, Geoff Barnes works to constantly improve the user experience with the Google Assistant. Next week he’ll take the stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) to speak about how voice can play a helpful role in the connected kitchen. To warm up, we asked him about the uncanny valley, the future of voice technology, and the task he uses his Google Assistant for every single day.

The Q&A has been edited for clarity.

The Spoon: As voice recognition and AI become more and more realistic, how will you develop user experience (UX) to avoid the uncanny valley?
Geoff Barnes: The problem with the uncanny valley as Masahiro Mori described it was in people’s discomfort with the artificial trying to imitate the real and getting uncannily close. But he was dealing with physical robots, and the chasm between an obvious robot and a human being is both hugely multidimensional compared to a voice assistant, and broader than I think most people imagine when they conceptualize the uncanny valley in terms of the ubiquitous chart.

In voice user interface (VUI) — especially in the age of autotune and after decades of AI voices in entertainment and interactive voice response (IVR) in everyday life — I think we’ve both narrowed and made shallow the uncanny valley. The result is that Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant sit perched to its left. At this point in history, I think the salient question is less about how to avoid getting stuck in the uncanny valley and more about deciding on which side of it your product can better serve your users.

What are some unexpected things you think about when designing UX for Google Assistant?
What comes to mind first is I do all sorts of things to keep from focusing on how a sample dialog looks in writing. When you’re designing for voice, what matters is how things sound spoken. In school, we all learn not to write the way that we talk. Yet that’s exactly what we want of the Assistant: conversationality. We want to make computers talk like humans — not the other way around. So I read all dialog aloud. I’ll pull colleagues aside to do table-reads with me. We have text-to-speech (TTS) simulators that can play our text in the Assistant’s voice.

Another: I try to think about all the possible ways in which normal use might break the experience. For instance, Google Home has pretty great beam-forming [Ed note: beam-forming is technology which allows it to pick up your voice amid extraneous noise], but the mic still picks up cross-talk and ambient sounds. If something the user says is polluted by stray words, the Assistant needs to be able to help with conversation repair. The same goes for users responding in snippets, sentence fragments, and other partial structures where their intent might not be fully revealed, and thus might not be recognized. Part of human conversation is natural repair in situations like these, so we spend a lot of time designing to emulate that in the Google Assistant.

What role do you envision voice assistants playing in the homes — and kitchens — of the future?
Right now, a lot of what we see people using virtual assistants for is task completion, and I think that will continue. As virtual assistants evolve, though, we’ll see the complexity of tasks they can handle increase, and people will put them to more complicated and valuable use. Imagine virtual assistants that can interpret and address really complex requests, can carry on multiple conversational threads at once without losing track of contexts, and can work with you on a range of time-scales. Suddenly, you’re not talking about a fact-checking timer in the kitchen with you; you’re talking about a presence that can be a communications hub, keep you company while guiding you through complex recipes and routines, and do things like plan your date night — from booking dinner reservations, to hiring the babysitter, to ordering flowers.

What’s something you use your Google Assistant for every single day?
I like to drink good coffee in the morning, and for nearly 10 years, that meant I’d get up and make a Chemex. Friends thought I was a little crazy for not having a pre-set automatic coffee maker, but every automatic coffee maker I’d tried had two problems: First, it made coffee that smelled and tasted like burning plastic, and second, most burners are so hot that they scald the coffee within a few minutes of it being brewed. So you have to make sure you’re awake right when you told the coffee maker you would be, or else your plastic-flavored coffee would be even further burnt by the time you got to it.

Enslaving myself to a timer for a bad cup of coffee didn’t sound that great. With the advent of smart switches and Google Assistant integrations, though, I found a great solution: I got a Technivorm Moccamaster (which makes delicious coffee) and plugged it into a Wemo switch that I named “the coffee maker”. Now, every morning when I wake up — no matter whether I’m up early or I’ve overslept — I tell my Google Home, “Hey Google, start the coffee maker,” and in 5 minutes I have a perfect pot of coffee waiting for me two floors away. It’s a real first-world life-changer, but it’s a life-changer nonetheless.

—

Thanks, Geoff! If you want to see him speak more about Google’s work on connected kitchen platforms, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

Innit Adds Arçelik To Growing List of Appliance Partners

The smart kitchen was everywhere this year at IFA, Europe’s big appliance and tech expo, and one company that seemed to be on everyone’s dance card was Innit.

Not only was the company and its smart kitchen platform showing up in the booths of Google, LG, BSH Appliances, and Electrolux, but it also made an appearance with a new partner in Arçelik, the Turkish product conglomerate behind appliance brands Beko and Grundig.

The partnership incorporates Innit’s guided cooking technology and a library of 10 thousand recipes into Arçelik’s Homewhiz smart home platform. Homewhiz, which is akin to BSH Appliances Home Connect, serves as an underlying smart home connectivity platform. With this new partnership, Innit brings HomeWhiz firmly into the kitchen and cooking experience by synchronizing an Innit guide cook with Grundig and Beko connected appliances, sending cooking parameters to the appliances as the user walks through a recipe.

While neither Arçelik or Innit made any announcements in English about the partnership, you can find some in other languages. A Google translated excerpt:

HomeWhiz enables users to control and monitor all home appliances through smart phones like your phone, tablet, or TV. Grundig HomeWhiz can help in deciding on the preparation to be cooked using the cognitive kitchen experience. Using voice control, users can ask for advice on recipes based on the ingredients available in the refrigerator.

For those who want to try something new, Grundig’s partnership with Innit allows HomeWhiz users to access over 10,000 recipes along with step-by-step video tutorials for customized meals according to their preferences.

The expanded presence of Innit at IFA culminates what has been an aggressive push into the European continent that started with the Electrolux partnership announced in April. Before that, the company announced a BSH Appliances Home Connect and LG partnerships at CES, and they were showing with both brands in Berlin.

The LG partnership is interesting in that it ties the Innit platform into LG’s new smart display with Google Assistant to enable guided cooking on LG’s Signature Kitchen Suite ovens. Innit first teased the integration with Google Assistant at CES (with a Tyler Florence demo, no less) and, as of now, Innit is the only multi-modal voice/video guided cooking integration on the forthcoming Google smart displays which are expected to start shipping this month.

GE Appliances and Electrolux Expand Google Assistant Capabilities

The big IFA show is set start over in Berlin, and like CES earlier this year, Google is making a big push there for its Google Assistant, working overtime to get its voice assistant embedded into, well, everything. News about Google integrations are rolling in as both GE Appliances and Electrolux today both announced expanded capabilities with Google Assistant.

First up, GE Appliances, a Haier company, said today that its suite of appliances will work directly with Google Assistant. Previously, GE Appliances required the use of Geneva Home Action in order to talk to Google, so you’d have to say “Google, ask Geneva Home to preheat the oven.” With the new, deeper integration, users can skip the Geneva step and just say “Google, preheat the oven.”

Elsewhere, Swedish appliance giant, Electrolux announced it is expanding its Google Assistant integration. Elextrolux will be adding Google Assistant voice control to its kitchen products in Europe, starting with a smart oven in 2019. Previously, Electrolux had added Google Assitant integration in the U.S. under its Fridgedaire and Anova lines.

Google is currently locked in a battle with Amazon and its Alexa assistant for dominance in the emerging voice control market. While Alexa had a head start and lined up numerous appliance integrations early on, Google has been making headway over the past year. Earlier this year LG announced that its SmartThinq line of connected appliances would work with both smart assistant platforms.

Google’s expanded presence is good because it gives consumers more flexibility when shopping for a new appliance. People shouldn’t have their choice of smart assistant determine what refrigerator they buy.

Food Tech News Roundup: Google Groceries, Icelandic Drones, and More “Bleeding” Vegan Burgers

What a week! We just wrapped up our first ever Smart Kitchen Europe event in Dublin. It was a whirlwind few days jam-packed with content and networking as foodtech innovators from across the continent got together to forge the future of food tech. If you’re curious, get to know the winner of our SKS Europe startup showcase, and read up on some smart ktichen news that dropped on the show floor. And of course, if you want to connect with many of the innovators from SKS Europe as well as a whole bunch more in person, make sure you’re at our flagship event in Seattle come October.

But enough about us — here’s a list of the some of the food tech news stories that snagged our interest this week. Perfect for reading over a second cup of coffee while fighting jet lag.

Photo: Naturl’i Foods.

Sainsbury’s to add plant-based “bleeding” burger to meat section
British retail giant Sainsbury’s announced this week that it will debut a “bleeding” plant-based burger in June 27th in 400 locations. In the spirit of the Impossible Burger or Moving Mountains, the patty is meant to look, smell, cook, and taste like a beef burger in an attempt to woo flexitarians who are trying to reduce their meat consumption but don’t want to compromise on flavor. The plant-based burger, made by Danish brand Naturli’ Foods, will be sold alongside its beef counterparts in the meat section. This announcement comes not long after Tesco, another large U.K.-based grocery chain, released the news that it would carry Beyond Burgers in their shops beginning in July of this year.

 

Photographer: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg

Iceland amps up drone deliveries in Reykjavik
Aha, Iceland’s largest online marketplace, is slated to expand the number of drones it flies through Reykjavik over the next two years. That’s right, expand — this would be in addition to the limited drone trial they launched last year with Israeli company Flytrex last year.

According to the BBC, the drones could be used to speedily shuttle everything from pizzas to organs destined for transplant — as long as they’re below the maximum weight of 3kg (6lb, 9oz). Their results will no doubt be critical for companies like UberEats, who are also piloting drone delivery programs.

Photo: Clearly Kombucha.

Molson Coors acquires California-based Kombucha brand
Kombucha, a non-alcoholic fermented tea beverage with purported gut health benefits, is not for everyone. But it appears that it’s certainly for Molson Coors, who recently acquired California-based brand Clearly Kombucha. The kombucha brand was founded in 2010 and will become part of Molson Coors’ craft and specialty import division, Tenth and Blake.

According to Grand View Research, the global kombucha market is expected to reach $4.46 billion by 2024. Lately, Molson Coors has been investing in non-alcoholic beverages; last year they purchased a minority stake in Bhakti, a Colorado-based chai tea company.

Photo: MiAlgae

Scottish agtech company raises £500k
MiAlgae, a Scottish company that turns algae into nutrient-dense animal and fish feed, raised £500k ($665k) from backers including Equity Gap, SIB and Edinburgh University’s Old College, reported the U.K. Business Angels Association. The algae is grown using co-products from the Scottish whiskey distillation process (yum), and is high in omega-3 and other nutrients. As it’s made from a byproduct, the feed also has a low environmental footprint, which is critical as our global demand for, and production of, meat and fish continues to grow.

 

Photo: ndb_photo via Flickr.

Google to sell groceries through Home and Assistant platforms in France
Earlier this week Google announced a joint venture with French grocery chain Carrefour. According to Bloomberg, the retailer said that this partnership marks the first time in France that fresh food will be marketed through Google’s platforms. French shoppers will be able to buy grocery products through Google Home and Google Assistant by 2019. This comes a little more than a month after Google unveiled Duplex, which allows Google Assistant to have surprisingly realistic phone conversations to do things like make restaurant reservations. We’ll see if this move can make Google Home/Assistant a competitor with Amazon’s Alexa, who already partnered with U.K. retailers for voice-controlled grocery shopping.

Silent Hack Could Send Malicious Instructions to Virtual Assistants

As virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri become more popular, so too will they become a more popular target for hackers. The New York Times reports that researchers in China and the U.S. have discovered a way to surreptitiously activate and command those virtual assistants by broadcasting instructions that are inaudible to the human ear.

From that NYT story:

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

Hackers might not care about your shopping list, but considering 41.4 percent of smart speakers are in the kitchen, it’s important to consider whether they could be used to turn on an oven while you’re out, or secretly start up a video call.

You should read the full Times article for a nice dive into the world of AI, speech recognition and modern hacking techniques. For our purposes here at The Spoon, these security notices are good to be aware of as companies look to use food as a way to get further into — and control more parts of — our homes.

Consider that Amazon, which is behind Alexa, wants to use a series of connected locks and cameras to allow deliveries into your home or car while you’re not there. Or that Google just this week announced more native control over kitchen appliances and a strikingly human sounding AI that can make calls on your behalf to set up appointments. And shortly after launching last year, a WiFi exploit created a security hole in Amazon Key’s connected camera setup.

Now before you toss your Echo into the ocean, you should know that there’s no evidence that this type of attack has ever happened outside the lab. But that won’t stop hackers from trying and improving their techniques.

The point is that it will obviously be incumbent upon companies to be as proactive and transparent as possible in determining and thwarting these type of attacks. But if we as consumers want to turn over more control over our lives to these virtual assistants, then it’s up to us as well to stay vigilant and educated about the new threats their use brings.

Google Assistant Will Make Restaurant Reservations, Adds New Controls

Google is holding its big I/O Developer conference this week, where it’s been debuting forthcoming new features, bells and whistles around its products. Google Assistant, the company’s virtual assistant, was no exception, getting a big bell that drew lots of whistles about its conversational capabilities, as well as some new smart home controls.

The Internet has been abuzz after the Google Duplex demo yesterday. Duplex uses artificial intelligence to hold convincing--yet limited--phone conversations on your behalf. CEO Sundar Pichai showed the Google Assistant making a phone call to a restaurant and placing a reservation, and what’s amazing is how human Google Assistant sounds, even inserting “umms” and “uhhs.”

Google Assistant engages with the person at the restaurant to not only select a time, but answer questions, and it even tries to find out what the wait times are on a Wednesday night. The best way to understand it is to watch this video:

Keynote (Google I/O '18)

Pichai said that Duplex was still in development, and didn’t give a release date for its integration into Assistant. And even though this type of interaction only works in restricted situations and under narrow parameters, my first thought was “How quickly can I throw away my Alexa?” While Amazon’s virtual assistant has trouble understanding the most basic questions in our house, Google’s Assistant will soon take over basic tasks like booking a restaurant for me.

And it looks like Google Assistant will be able to take on even more work around my house: the company announced nine new devices types that have native integration with the virtual assistant, including coffee makers, fridges and ovens. This means outside developers can embed Google Assistant controls directly into their products. As CNet explains, by working natively, you can ask Google to just “preheat the oven to 350 degrees,” instead of saying “Hey Google, ask LG to preheat the oven to 350 degrees.”

It’s obvious that Google sees big opportunities in its assistant, tying together many of its products (maps, calendar, etc.) in a truly useful fashion. This plus all the data the company hoovers up every day could allow them to more easily leapfrog over Alexa (and leave Apple further in the dust).