Yes, but the point of a smart fridge is it would just know when you put those carrots in the crisper bin, and would know your schedule, so if it’s saturday, you typically only cook on weekends, and those carrots would go bad before the next weekend, it would remind you to use them up now.
True. I imagine we’re close to a fridge knowing what’s in it, either via RFID tags in packaging or camera recognition, or probably both.
I can’t wait for someone’s left-over soup to be read as five year old sour cream.
You might be able to place a RFID tag on a container and then use a voice command to tell the fridge what it is and when it should be eaten, and to text a reminder in a few days. When you are done you could tell the fridge it was eaten and reuse the RFID tag. I guess you could tell Alexa that now. “Remind me in three days to eat the leftover soup.”
Could work like that, or the fridge’s screen pops up a question as you put the container in there saying it doesn’t recognize the package and asks you to categorize it. Bonus points for it to be voice driven.
If they ever come out with stuff like this, it will be great material for the stand-up comics!
If it’s not voice driven, I feel like my chances of doing anything would be… zero. If it is voice drive… maybe. My ice machine broke twice though, and of all the things I want fridges to do… I’d just like them to be better at what they do now. When this stuff breaks… costs a pretty penny to fix.
I don’t use the voice features on my phone. They’re too futuristic for me.
I voice text. I love it. Normal texting is a pain to me.
I also like to get voice directions when driving.
Fridge, order double chocolate ice cream.
I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that. Your doctor told me you need to lose weight.
Amazon does it via cameras now in their test retail store, and they have a vastly more difficult job. Machine learning is actually getting pretty good at image recognition these days.
“I don’t recognize the white package you just put in me. Would you like me to categorize it?” (Weird thinking about how a fridge would refer to itself!)
“Yes. It’s leftovers from dinner.”
“Got it. Leftover food from dinner. Would you like me to remind you to eat them by a certain date?”
“Yes. Three days from now.”
“Ok. I’ll remind you to eat today’s leftovers from dinner in the white package in three days.”
Yeah, that could work.
Some time ago, I realized that once Things are smart enough for me to use without being constantly irritated by them, they’ll be too spooky for me to actually want to use, and I’ll be spending my retirement looking for freon on r/vintageiceboxes.
Amazon also spends millions of dollars on its test retail store.
The R&D is expensive, but broadly applicable. Producing the hardware is cheap.
Yeah, if you’re already paying ~$1,000 for a new fridge, they could easily put 10 cameras in there and other sensors without adding much to the cost.
Maybe this is the old fogey in me, but it seems like the solution here is to build a label printer into the fridge door.
I need a fridge that says:
“I see you just took something out of me, looked at it for a long time, and then put it back into me. What are you doing, Dave?”
“I don’t want to eat it.”
“Why don’t you want to eat it?”
“…”
“Why don’t you want to eat it?”
“Because it went bad.”
“Then why did you put it back in the fridge?”
“…”
“Throw it out. Don’t put garbage in me.”
The worst part of all these new internet connected gidgats is the stupid app they make you download.
It’s cheaper than shipping a physical doodat with buttons, after all. Also they can just ship a barely-functional model and keep working on the software the next few months.
I like buttons. And knobs. Guests can use them, I don’t need to give them my phone.
The Phillips hue lamps are neat but I don’t adjust anything anymore. Maybe if there was a button to change to yellow light in the evening and blue light in the morning (circadian rhythms). I don’t want to dig out my phone to do so.
I got this fancy Dyson fan, supposed to measure humidity levels and whatever. App never connects. Oh well. Was it too hard to add a little LED showing the humidity level? Why do I need to know the humidity level of my bedroom when I’m not in it anyway?
If they put the feature into the hardware, there’d be no way for them to track and record your habits and sell the data to other companies.