When June launched its smart oven a couple years ago, the idea of having a camera inside to intelligently determine cooking parameters was pretty darn novel.
And ok sure, while having a CTO like Nikhil Bhogal – one of the chief contributors to much of the iPhone’s early imaging innovation – on the founder team made it all make sense in retrospect, I would still argue that an oven with machine vision was pretty far-fetched.
Now however, fast forward a couple of years and June is no longer the only game in town when it comes to machine-vision enabled consumer ovens. In fact, some of the kitchen’s bigger players are jumping on board with the idea of a camera-powered cooking cavity.
One company which recently joined June with its own camera-enabled oven was Hoover, a division of Italy’s Candy. The Vision, which Hoover announced last fall, has a built-in camera within the oven cavity as well as a touch display on the front which allows users to use apps like Spotify and view cooking centric content such as recipes and video-guided cooking instructions.
You can see the £1,499 appliance in action in a demo reel below:
And now, Electrolux is joining the camera-enabled oven party. Last month, Europe’s biggest appliance manufacturer announced a new oven with a camera inside, the CombiSteam Pro Smart. The oven, which has built-in sous vide capabilities, will first be available in Sweden and Norway.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that Electrolux has announced a camera-enabled oven. The company first floated the concept in 2014 and made an announcement about the AEG ProCombi Plus at IFA 2015, but from what I can tell this first product never shipped.
And while there’s been other crazy ideas like a camera-enabled air fryer (thanks Gourmia) over the past couple of years, the only company to really make a go of camera-powered consumer cooking is June.
Now, that’s about to change as big appliance makers look to leverage cameras to help the consumer do more in the kitchen.
