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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

voice assistant

ConverseNow Acquires Drive-Thru Voice AI Specialist Valyant AI

Today, ConverseNow announced that it has acquired drive-thru conversational AI specialist Valyant AI. According to the announcement about the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – the entire Valyant AI team will be retained post-acquisition.

Until now, ConverseNow has largely succeeded in winning restaurant chain business through call center voice automation. With this deal, ConverseNow brings a drive-thru AI specialist into the fold, jumpstarting its efforts to penetrate the growing market for AI-voice-assisted drive-thru technology.

Valyant AI, which started quickly out of the gate in 2019 with a win at a Techcrunch automation and AI pitch competition in 2019, has since run trials with its Holly voice AI at CKE and Checkers. The company’s technology, which is differentiated from ConverseNow’s in that the AI runs locally on proprietary hardware (ConverseNow’s AI runs in the cloud), also includes a generative AI training application called AI Employee Assist, which restaurant staff can ask questions and receive instant responses. According to the announcement, the Valyant AI technology will be integrated into both the drive-thru and tables by the end of Q3.

The deal is another signal that the restaurant voice AI and automation is heating up. Other providers, such as Presto and Soundhound, have been growing their installed base for both phone and drive-thru automation solutions, while large chains like Wendy’s have been developing their own voice AI technology. McDonald’s, which had been running a trial of voice assistant powered by IBM, recently announced they were sunsetting the initiative and would evaluate other voice AI technologies and select another solution by the year’s end.

Beyond the obvious employee cost-saving benefits of voice automation, QSRs also see opportunities to increase total order size through upselling capabilities. According to ConverseNow, its technology can detect conversational nuances and personalize orders based on contextual data and information gained in real time during the order process.

TinyChef Buys Zelish, Adds App and Shoppable Recipe Capability To Voice Cooking Platform

Last month, voice cooking platform startup TinyChef (formerly known as KloveChef) acquired Zelish, a meal-planning app that was part of the BSH/Techstars Future Home Accelerator.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, gives TinyChef an app and shoppable recipes to go with their voice-based cooking platform. TinyChef also said they are in the process of raising a $750,000 Series A round.

I asked TinyChef CEO Bahubali Shete to tell us more about the reasoning behind the deal and give us an update on the combined business. You can see our interview below:

Can you tell us why you felt like acquiring a shoppable recipe startup made sense for you?

Zelish isn’t just a shoppable recipe platform. Yes, this is one of their offerings, but their primary offering is to help people plan, shop and cook. Shop Recipes is a mere subset of the core offering that was essential as people were locked up at home and wanted to replicate exotic chef-made dishes, which also helped them bring in spreading awareness & getting a good chunk of revenue.

We conducted thorough research studies in North America of both smart speaker users and non-users. It was evident that people would continue to use their smartphones as personal device and smart speakers would be more like a family devices.

We recognized that some parts of the kitchen journey like discovery, planning and shopping, were easier to do on a handheld smart device.

In summary, while consumers like handsfree cooking with voice assistants, they still want to use smartphones; hence having a companion app that gives the freedom of choosing the device at different parts of the journey is critical to winning the consumers. Zelish had built the entire journey and it made a lot of sense to get on onboard a product that has been tried, tested and much loved by both users and tech editors. Secondly, a shoppable recipe platform with a web plugin is a perfect way to tie up with food influencers with recipe websites/Youtube channels.

How do you see incorporating Zelish’s shoppable recipe and other technology into the TinyChef voice-guided cooking platform/consumer experience?

We feel that Zelish’s offerings can be integrated with ours pretty seamlessly. We are enhancing Zelish’s app experience by empowering users to pick a dish they want to cook on the app and send it to their smart speakers for a hands-free cook-along experience.

The other offering by Zelish is shoppable recipes. Tinychef has a complimentary feature that allowed users to add ingredients to the shopping list. This is a precursor of the shoppable recipes feature. We are now working to integrate Zelish’s shoppable recipes feature into the voice platform. 

Can you give an update on current users and other metrics for TinyChef?

TinyChef has 1.4 million unique users on the platform and 120 thousand monthly active users. There are roughly 70,000 meals cooked per month using our cook-along experience. Traffic is currently heavily weighted from India, with approximately 80% coming from India and 20% from North America. The size of our recipe repository is 200,000 with 20,000 of those being actively used by our our users.

How has TinyChef grown in terms of usage? How has the company grown in the past year in terms of employees?

Tinychef’s user base has doubled in the last 8 months. Our users are using hands-free cooking mode way more than ever witnessed before. We have done some pilots with Amazon for voice shopping in India with great success.  

We have increased from 9 members to 15 employees over the past year.

Do you have any stats on Zelish?

Zelish has had approximately 130,000 overall downloads. 40% of the downloads are monthly active users.

How did you fund the acquisition? Can you give deal amount?

While we won’t be able to disclose the finer details of the acquisition, we are in the process of raising some additional funds.

We have been able to expedite a couple of our tech offerings by joining hands with Zelish. This acquisition expedited our development plans by almost a year so now we are doubling down to constantly adding more features to both our app & the skill. We now are looking to add more features & fueling our user growth plans. The same would also be supported by user growth plans both in North America and India. The funds would be our fuel to this hockey stick growth in both continents.

How many employees are coming over to TinyChef?

6 employees of Zelish will be joining the TinyChef team.

KloveChef Opens Up Voice-Guided Cooking Platform to Publishers

KloveChef, the voice-guided cooking startup cofounded by one of India’s biggest celebrity chefs in Sanjeev Kapoor, is opening up its platform this month to publishers wanting to add voice-guided cooking functionality to their recipes.

The new tool will allow anyone who has recipe content — chefs, cookbook authors, bloggers or food retailers — to upload their recipes to KloveChef’s platform via a web interface and it will convert them into a voice-guided recipes.

“We will democratize the interactive recipe creation and distribution,” said Bahubali Shété, KloveChef cofounder and CEO, in an interview with The Spoon.

Shété told me that recipe publishers will be able to use KloveChef to publish their recipes across a variety of voice platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Home and Amazon Fire TV. To do so, they just copy the recipe URL or paste the full recipe into the web interface and KloveChef will convert into a voice-guided recipe.

Shété also said that publishers will have the option of letting users send their recipes posted on other web channels such as YouTube or Pinterest to their voice assistants for guided cooking.

KloveChef is opening up their voice platform after finding some success with their Alexa voice skill targeted primarily at home cooks in India. According to Shété, the guided cooking assistant has a total of 465,000 users and 100,000 monthly active users.

Shété says publishers can make money through KloveChef if the recipe is converted into a shopping list. The recipe-to-shopping list feature, which KloveChef has been testing through its app in India, currently has over 1 million recipes converted into shopping lists via voice search.

I have to admit, I like the idea of self-publishing recipes to voice platforms. It reminds me of the early days of ebooks, when authors would use technology from early pioneers like Smashwords to put their books into the world and on other popular platforms. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, just as like those early days of ebooks, recipe self-publishers are relying on Amazon to reach the end consumer, only instead of Kindle this time it’s Alexa.

It’s too soon to see how successful KloveChef will be in attracting cooks for its voice guided recipe assistant outside of India. In its home market, they’ve been able to leverage the large reach of Kapoor, while here in the states, Alexa tends to favor its featured partners such as Food Network or Tasty. KloveChef will have to compete with the algorithm-favored partners through attracting recipe publishers such as popular food bloggers or food retailers with built-in audiences to accrue a sizeable user base.

Looking forward, the company hopes to also attract users by making the platform better over time. One of the early features will be adapting guided cooking where users can speed up a recipe or slow it down depending on their experience. The company plans to release the new capabilities by mid-August.

Video: To Succeed in the Smart Kitchen, “You Have to Get Multi-Modal Fast”

Voice is becoming more and more present in consumer electronics. At the same time, appliances are also coming with a whole host of AI-powered, software-driven interfaces and interactions.

How do these components work together in the kitchen? In this video from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Stacey Higginbotham of the IoT Podcast moderates a panel with Shelby Bonnie of Pylon AI, Adnan “Boat” Agboatwalla of Samsung and Jason Clarke of Crank Software about the evolution of smart appliances and interfaces in the heart of the home.

There’s a lot to consider. As Clarke said, “there’s all these interfaces that I want to jump between depending on the task and the environment of the moment.” For example, if his daughter is being loud, he doesn’t want to rely on voice to turn on his oven; if his hands are dirty, vice versa.

In short: the smart kitchen can’t function just with video screens or voice, but both working together. “You have to get to multi-modal fast,” said Bonnie.

But for the ultimate user experience these appliances all have to work together, too. “There should be a platform that connects everything… multi-branded appliances should be able to talk and work together,” said Agboatwalla. Easy? Maybe not. But with conversations like these, we can pave the way to a more connected kitchen and a better cooking experience.

Watch the full video below.

Beyond The Dial: Exploring Voice and AI-Powered Interfaces For The Kitchen

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Video: CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson on Her Best Cooking Gadgets

We at The Spoon have long been fans of Ashlee Clark Thompson, Associate Editor at CNet and hilarious twitter poster. (You may have seen her on stage at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit talking about the future of food.)

Like us, Thompson is fascinated by the smart kitchen market. “The kitchen has become the center of the home,” she said. “We’re seeing all these screens pop up everywhere. For me, as a person that loves to cook, that’s exciting. But it’s also a little scary, because I want products that will last.”

Chris Albrecht caught up with Thompson at this year’s Housewares Show Smart Home Pavillion to debrief about said products. Check out the video to see Albrecht and Clark Thompson discuss the best cooking gadgets to invest in, their hesitations about connected products, and how tech can make us better cooks.

CNET at the IHA Smart Talks Theater

Interested in hearing more about the Smart Kitchen Summit? Our first European event is coming up June 11-12th in Dublin, and we’ll be returning to Seattle for our fourth year in October.  

Food Tech News Roundup: Tooth Calorie Counters, Snoop Dogg, and Amazon’s Next Move

The time has come for our weekly roundup of food tech news stories; ones that caught our eye, but weren’t quite big enough to justify a whole post. This week’s news update focused on some of our favorite foods (and drinks): pizza, beer, and coffee. Also, did we mention that Snoop Dogg is involved? Or at least his voice is. There’s also a tiny tooth sensor that can track everything you eat and — surprise, surprise — more news on Amazon’s journey to rule the ecommerce world. Let’s get started, shall we?

Photo: Modernist Cuisine

Modernist Cuisine’s newest book is about pizza

Modernist Cuisine may have just published their 5-volume compendium Modernist Bread a few months ago, but they’ve already announced the subject of their next literary venture: pizza. The multivolume will be written by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, along with the Modernist Cuisine team, and will cover a broad array of pizza recipes, pizza history, and pizza-making techniques, both traditional and modern.

It’ll be a year before the ‘za anthology comes out, but if you want to give Nathan Myhrvold and his team some insider advice on your favorite pizzerias and pizza-makers, they’re already crowdsourcing tips: just email pizza@modernistcuisine.com. Then treat yourself to a slice of pepperoni for doing a good deed.

Photo: Diageo

Alexa and Snoop Dogg are your new mixologists

This week Amazon Alexa partnered with Diageo to launch a “Happy Hour” skill. It offers three features, including one called ‘Mix-It-Up’ which offers drink recommendations based on users’ mood and tastes. There’s also the ‘Find a Bar’ feature which has a Yelp integration to recommend bars nearby that serve Diageo cocktails (which, since Diageo is the world’s largest spirits producer, is pretty much everywhere). All recommendations are sent to the user’s Alexa app. This is another example of Amazon pushing the boundaries with voice assistants, taking a step forward so that competitors like Google and Apple will have to rush to catch up.

My favorite part of this skill is the fact that Snoop Dogg is involved. Yes, Snoop Dogg. Users can also ask Alexa for “Snoop Dogg’s drink of choice,” and he’ll give cocktail recommendations. One can only hope they’re not all iterations of gin and juice. 

Photo: Starbucks

Starbucks hops onto the blockchain train

Starbucks announced this week that it would launch a pilot program applying traceability technology to its coffee beans to monitor their journey from “bean to cup.” They’ll partner with small coffee farmers in Costa Rica, Colombia and Rwanda, logging and sharing information about the coffee supply chain. Essentially, they’ve embraced the blockchain trend — though they don’t use that term anywhere in their release.

With this program Starbucks is hoping to connect its coffee drinkers to coffee farmers, though it’s not exactly clear how. While the traceability may indeed give their farmers an “individual identity” — one that will no doubt be capitalized upon as a marketing angle — the system is only really applicable to the players downstream.

I can only see this used as a marketing scheme. With this program, Starbucks can trace beans from one particular farm through the roasting and packaging process, and can then market that product as a “single origin coffee” (not doubt for a higher price). This is something that previously only smaller coffee roasters and distributors could do. But thanks to blockchain tech, Starbucks can hop on the bandwagon. We’ll have to wait and see if they actually deliver on their promises of transparency, but suffice it to say I’m healthily skeptical.

Amazon expands Whole Foods stores to support delivery

Amazon is looking for bigger Whole Foods stores in urban centers to serve as both grocery stores and delivery jumping off points for some of their most popular items, like books and electronics. If Whole Foods serves as a city-based delivery hub, it would reduce Amazon’s need to maintain warehouses for non-grocery items. That way, they can deliver goods to urban consumers more quickly.

This move comes a little over a month after Amazon started rolling out 2-hour Whole Foods delivery. It’s another step in the ecommerce giant’s strategy to use brick-and-mortar Whole Foods locations to bolster their online sales.

Photo: Nomiku

Nomiku expands delivery to 6 more states

Nomiku, one of the first companies to launch a home sous vide circulator, just expanded  the map for their Sous Chef meals. The company started experimenting last year with food delivery and, after a year of working the kinks out within their home state of California, has started shipping their sous vide ready meals to to six additional states: Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Their meals, which offer a large range of vegetarian and meat options, are precooked meals are heated to serving temperature in 30 minutes with the Nomiku sous vide appliance. Nomiku is part of a growing number of startups such as Tovala, ChefSteps, and FirstChop that are pairing cooking appliances with subscription food services to create additional convenience for the consumer.

Image: Fio Omenetto, Ph.D., Tufts University

A new tooth tracker can track everything you eat

Think of it as a calorie counter you can’t cheat, a fitbit for your eating habits. Researchers at Tuft’s University have developed a 2mm x 2mm sensor that you can stick on your tooth to monitor what you eat. It syncs up with your mobile device to wirelessly transmit data on your glucose, salt, and alcohol content. While this could be a helpful tool for some people who want to keep a super accurate account of their calorie intake, it could have some scary implications. It could exacerbate unhealthy food obsessions, or create a way for people to monitor individuals who are supposed to be limiting their sugar, salt, or alcohol intakes.

In the future, scientists want to create abilities for the sensor to track nutrients, chemicals, and psychological states. And if that brings Black Mirror to mind, I’d say you’re not too far off base.

Hearst Unveils Visual Guided Recipe Skill for Amazon Echo

Alexa, let’s have Pancetta Chicken for dinner.

Last month, publisher Hearst expanded its Amazon Echo- and Spot-enabled Good Housekeeping skill to include connected recipes. Dubbed Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen, the skill provides simple “meal ideas” that can be thrown together in 30 minutes or less. The recipes will be curated by Susan Westmoreland, food director of Good Housekeeping, and, in addition to being speedy, are said to be easy to execute.

Previously, the Good Housekeeping skill only included step-by-step advice to remove stains. (Don’t worry—it can still help you get out that wine spill from your carpet.)

With the Good Housekeeping skill, users can select a recipe based on a photo and short description (or tell Alexa to do it for them). The smart display then provides a step-by-step guide through the recipe. Users can swipe around to see more recipes, skip ahead in the steps, and reference the ingredients. They can also use voice commands like “Alexa, tell Good Housekeeping to continue” if they want to move forward in the recipe but don’t want to touch the screen with, say, raw chicken hands.

Hearst’s expansion into recipes isn’t exactly surprising. At the end of 2016, the media company took a big leap into the realms of AI and AR by establishing the Native and Emerging Technologies (NET) group, which focuses heavily on voice-activated experiences for virtual assistants and smartphones.

This new skill speaks (literally) towards the growing role of voice assistants in the connected household, and the kitchen in particular. “We’re raising the stakes from what a user can expect [in terms of] information and utility from these devices,” Chris Papaleo, executive director of emerging technology at Hearst, told AdWeek. Which is something we’ve predicted but haven’t seen developed in as big a way as we’d thought—yet.

Photo: AdWeek

It also brings us one step closer to the integration of recipes (and other food media) and AI-enabled voice technology.

We’ve seen a voice-enabled smart kitchen assistant before with Freshub, which lets users add items to their shopping carts using voice commands. Then, at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Emma Persky, who runs point on the Google Assistant’s guided cooking team, talked about Google’s work combining recipe content with their voice-enabled AI platform by offering video aids for recipe steps (say, sautéeing an onion). And Amazon’s 2016 partnership with AllRecipes allowed users to access voice-guided cooking instructions of their 60,000-strong recipe database.

But by combining recipes on a visual display with voice-enabled controls—albeit simplistic ones like telling it to move to the next step—this new skill from Good Housekeeping is the first time that virtual assistants have really entered the hands-free recipes zone in a synched-up visual and auditory way. While the Google Assistant can show you a video of how to sauté an onion if you’re stuck, it doesn’t have a connected visual element that takes you through each step of the recipe, since it relies almost entirely on voice guidance. This is nice since you don’t have to add another piece of equipment to your virtual assistant lineup, but not as helpful when you’re wondering how small the recipe wants you to dice your pancetta.

With this new skill, Hearst is betting on more voice assistants expanding into smart displays and a corresponding need for more visual content in the sphere. As the number and popularity of voice assistants grow and become a more commonplace part of consumers’ homes, I imagine we’ll see a lot more skills aimed at facilitating the home cooking process, from expanded shoppable recipe applications to visual cooking aids.

As of now, the Test Kitchen skill doesn’t have a sponsor. But with so many large companies trying to carve out a space in the trending foodtech world, it seems only a matter of time before a big-name recipe site or even CPG brand (who have been trying to get into foodtech in any way they can) snags the title.

The success (or lack thereof) of this skill could indicate where we are in that process.

 

“Alexa, How Can You Be Used in Restaurants?”

There’s a good chance that an Amazon Alexa or Google Home device is on a holiday wish list of someone you know. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that 15 million Amazon Echo units have been sold across the U.S. (Amazon does not disclose sales figures). As of now, Alexa’s use in dining out is centered more around at-home, consumer experiences. A quick glance through the restaurant related Alexa skills show an emphasis on discovery, information and ordering. Find a nearby restaurant. Order a pizza. Etc.

But is there a bigger opportunity for Alexa and Google Home inside the restaurant?

According to the National Restaurant Association, there are more than 1 million restaurant locations in the U.S. generating $799 billion in sales. One million on its own isn’t huge, but with some creative thinking, you could easily envision multiple devices deployed per restaurant, plus all the data captured from in-store interactions and you can see restaurants becoming a front in the voice assistant battle worth fighting over.

As a fun thought experiment, I put together a few potential uses for Alexa inside dining out:

An interactive table alert. Instead of a dumb, inert buzzer that flashes and vibrates when your table is ready, modify an Echo Dot to be the messenger. Instead of bugging the host, patrons could ask Alexa how much longer the wait time is, and be alerted when they can be seated. If you wanted to get real adventurous, in the right setting, you could even do ongoing interactive trivia games to keep people entertained.

Informed ordering. With its touch screen, an Echo Show would be an excellent way to show menu items, explain more about ingredients, and highlight popular dishes. You could also enable ordering and payment for a more streamlined experience. In a cruel, horrible world, one can imagine restaurants offer a cheaper meal if customers allow ads to be displayed while they’re eating (please don’t do that).

Back of house. Alexa could be used for quick ordering of ingredients, equipment or other sundries which, of course, could be fulfilled by Amazon that day. It could also be used to alert employees about their break times and inform them of any news or specials.

Communication back home. By gathering real time data inside a restaurant, Alexa at home could provide better, more informed real-time decisions about where and when to eat at a particular establishment.

Having said all this, there are some real world limitations to this type of implementation:

There’s a pretty small needle to thread in terms of the types of restaurant voice control will work. Too loud and voice control is useless and you can’t hear Alexa talk. Too quiet and voice control is annoying for everyone else.

It’s hard to imagine restaurants buying and modding Echo devices or writing their own skills. However companies such as Toast or Square could weave Alexa into their platforms and embed them on customized devices that are sold into restaurants.

We are still in the early stages of voice assistants and how far into our lives they will go. But as they get better, restaurant owners may not want to wait until the holidays to get their own.

Have you seen Alexa or Google Home used in interesting ways inside restaurants? Or have a wild idea about how they could? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

The WWDC 2017 Prediction Show (Smart Home Edition)

Are you ready for WWDC?

Apple’s big developer conference is just three days away, and so it’s time to make some predictions. I get together with my old friend Adam Justice from Connectsense to discuss what we can expect this coming Monday from Apple on the smart home front.

Topics discussed include:

  • We speculate whether Apple will release a Siri speaker
  • Possible features of a Siri speaker, such as camera, touchscreen, HomeKit capabilities and more
  • What’s in store for HomeKit
  • Ways in which Apple could improve the Home app
  • What to expect for Siri at WWDC

Microsoft Unveils Echo Competitor Powered By Cortana

Microsoft is not necessarily a leader in the smart home these days, trailing Samsung, Apple and Google in platforms and hardware offerings and instead focusing on other core offerings. But as the Amazon Echo and then Google Home voice assistants jumped onto the scene, the tech world speculated about whether Apple and Microsoft would put their respective AI voice assistants – Siri and Cortana – into physical devices, too.

Rumors abound that Apple is about to do just that – but they’ll be last to the table as Microsoft previewed its Cortana-powered wireless speaker on Monday. Ahead of their BUILD developer conference, which starts tomorrow, Microsoft showed off the Invoke, a speaker manufactured by Harman Kardon and enabled by the company’s digital voice assistant.

Invoke does what Google Home & Echo do for the most part – weather reports, news, music, reminders, timers, etc – and the details thus far are fairly underwhelming. The company reported Invoke will offer “deep integration with Microsoft’s suite of knowledge and productivity tools,” making it a potentially interesting tool for home offices or businesses as a scheduling tool. The device will also have integration with Skype, allowing users to make calls via the platform.  It will certainly sound better than the Echo with Harman Kardon audio engineering and design behind the speaker – and that feature alone might drive audiophiles to Invoke over the competition.

Microsoft’s blog does not detail how or if the device will allow for third-party developers to build additional features and functions – something both Echo and Google Home are capitalizing on to add use cases and turn the speakers into sous chefs, personal assistants and smart home controllers.

Harman Kardon’s press release announcing the speaker definitely positions the audio brand to offer a competitive device to other premium smart speakers like Sonos – with a high-powered AI engine inside. The speaker will have seven microphones and advanced ambient noise technology to help Cortana hear you even in loud environments – another area where HK’s contribution could give Invoke an edge over the Echo. Pricing wasn’t given yet but the product should be available via Microsoft stores in the fall.

With the BUILD conference starting tomorrow, we’ll be sure to share updates and details about Invoke and the features it might bring to the home and kitchen.

Turning Text Messages Into Machine Language For The Smart Home

There’s a new race in the smart home – it’s not about who will control your home but rather how. The introduction of voice assistant devices Amazon Echo and Google Home have definitely changed the conversation and the market for how we interact with the tech inside our homes. But if speaking commands to things in the house to turn them on or off or check their status seems unnatural, you could always text instead.

That’s the premise of Unified Inbox, a small company based Singapore that’s developed soon-to-be-patented software that delivers smart home control via text messenger. It’s easy to see the appeal of texting your home – it’s an easy and common way for humans to communicate with each other and it removes the awkwardness of barking out orders to an inanimate object.

The CEO of Unified Inbox, Toby Ruckert, makes the case to Reuters, saying “Think of it as a universal translator between the languages that machines speak … and us humans.” Though the company is small and privately funded, it has companies like Samsung, Bosch and IBM jumping on board to integrate functionality into their own devices. Using Unified Inbox’s platform, manufacturers can add a text assistant to their product, capitalizing on the ubiquity of smartphones in every home.

The API developed by Unified Inbox is called UnificationEngine or UE and works by taking text inputs to a messenger app and translates the human words into machine language. Described as an “IoT messenging platform,” UE was developed to bridge the language gap between people and the things around them.

Credit: Reuters

Text commands such as “turn off the lights,” “start the coffee machine at 6,” and “preheat the oven to 450” can be typed into over 20 different messenger apps along with Twitter and SMS to control a variety of home devices. From ovens and kettles, the platform can work with many appliances and Unified Inbox is testing more including garage door openers and toasters.

But why have “more than half of the world’s appliance makers” – according to Ruckert – signed up to partner with this small startup? Reuters reports that Ruckert and other tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg see a huge future in text control – and think that big companies are worried about Amazon’s dominance.

“They’re worried the big tech companies’ one-appliance-controls-all approach will relegate them to commodity players, connecting to Alexa or another dominant platform, or being cast aside if Amazon moves into making its own household appliances.”

Check out the full story on Unified Inbox, their API and how machine learning that continues to change how we talk to our things.