How smart is the smart kitchen, really?

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0:39Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Android Fridges. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm here with Jen Pattison-Tui. Hi, Jen. Welcome back. Hi, David. Great to be back, as always. This is part two of our Smart Home series. If you missed last week's episode, go back and listen to it. We got deep in our feelings about the smart kitchen. It was very fun. for this episode, Jen, we gave you a very specific and I suspect very arduous task, which is to basically explore the state of the art of the smart kitchen. You have kind of acquired as smart a kitchen as probably any reasonable person could be expected to have at this point in time.

1:16And we asked you to basically demonstrate over the course of a few days exactly how smart you could make your kitchen and your life. And we asked you to keep a voice Memo's diary of the whole experience. And we're going to play a few clips of what we have here, right? Yeah, yeah. So basically, the idea was, okay, I'm going to really put my smart kitchen to the test. As I mentioned, I had bought a few new appliances in the last couple years. But even myself as a smart home review, I haven't really dove into all of the features that they have, you know, I haven't had to test them for work. So I think it's a very common issue in the smart kitchen, people get smart devices and actually never connect them or do any of the features that they have.

1:57So I was like, I'm really going to like dive into the features of the stuff that I bought for myself. And then I'm also going to explore how those devices and other smart kitchen devices that I've tested work together, because this was sort of something we talked about a lot in the last episode, that a big problem with the smart home in general is that interoperability. You sort of feel siloed. A lot of devices feel very sort of siloed. So that was kind of the overall theme, like put my smart kitchen to the test. But I also wanted to use, based on chatting with Ben and Nick, the founder of Fresco and the Whisk app, now Samsung Food, really puts us to the test how technology can help us cook in terms of using recipes, guided cooking, make me a better chef in my kitchen.

2:42Because that sort of seemed to be a theme that has emerged in the smart kitchen. It's not so much that the kitchen is going to cook for you, but the kitchen is going to help you cook better. So that was kind of one of the things I was really excited to try. Tried a few dishes I've never tried before. I also wanted to see if the smart kitchen could save me time because convenience is sort of one of the big selling points of the smart home. That was sort of the framing for my five to seven days of using my smart kitchen to its fullest extent. So one of the things I've been thinking a lot about since we talked to Nick and Ben for last week's episode is this idea of cooking and kind of the role of the smart kitchen being kind of on a longer timeline than we think about, right?

3:28Like we talk about the smart kitchen as I'm standing in the kitchen making something. I have a recipe in my hand and I need to go from recipe and raw ingredients to made thing. but actually the way they were thinking about it and the way I think I'm curious to hear how it affected you is the timeline of that is much longer right it's like it's it's grocery shopping which is actually about meal planning which is actually about recipe discovery which is actually about health questions and then on the other side it's it's prep it's cleanup it's dishwashing it's all this different stuff so actually there is this gigantic spectrum of like time and activities did your smart kitchen hit that whole spectrum like how how broad a look at this did you feel like you could take going in yeah no i definitely started sort of from the beginning with the meal planning which is something i have tried to do for many months many years you know i have two kids i have a husband who insists on a full hot meal we i don't get away with cereal for dinner that was sort of very kind of core to the experiment for me was can this be better than it was before because I have never successfully managed to meal plan.

4:34It's time consuming and tiresome and can be kind of expensive upfront. You know, in the end, it's probably saves you money because you don't end up buying takeout, but it's a chore for sure. And I really wanted to see Samsung Food in particular. That's sort of something that this app touts that it can help you with putting it all into one place because there are lots of great tools out there for meal planning. Digital tools, paper tools. I've seen very fancy notebooks you can buy for$50 in stationary stores where you plan out your meal. I mean, I'm definitely going to end up buying one of those and then never using it.

5:08That feels like me. Yeah. You know, when you spend more time planning than you're actually doing. Oh, yeah. And I've just not, I've never found a good solution for me. So as a smart home reviewer, I was hoping that this would be the solution. Just, you know, spoiler alert, it worked, but it still took a lot of time. I would assume, by the way, that the beginning of this process would involve the first smart gadget in our array here, which would be the fridge. That's the idea behind the smart fridge, right, is that it can help you with some knowledge of what's in the fridge and what you buy and what you eat and what's going bad and whatever, actually help you make that meal plan.

5:45Right. That's kind of the dream. Was that the beginning of your test? That was where I started, standing in front of my giant tablet in the fridge in my kitchen. And that did not go that well, I hate to say. There were tools there that were better than the last time I had tried this, because when I first got the fridge, it did have some of these capabilities to tell you what was in them. And those have been upgraded over the years, which is a good thing about a lot of these smart kitchen appliances. As I mentioned, I started this about two years ago. I got a lot of smart appliances, although I've had my fridge for longer.

6:17And over those two years, more features have come. I can now voice control my oven to an extent. And the smart fridge can now recognize more foods. But it didn't do it very well. Looking here, it thinks my hummus is a salmon fillet. It thinks my salmon fillet is meat. And it seems to think my sour cream pot is a sandwich. And the whipped cream is a sports drink. So, not entirely accurate. So it would have just been quicker for me to dictate a note into Siri of what was in my fridge rather than using the food app. But the pieces and parts are there. So I could add using voice, using Bixby, which was a new experience for me because I've never used Bixby before.

7:06And that's Samsung's voice assistant that's built into my fridge. And I was able to add all the food that was in my pantry to the food list so that I would have this master list. You know, that's kind of the ultimate goal that I would love the Smart Kitchen to be able to do for me is keep track of what food I have. If I went and bought that fancy Asian sauce for my one dish that I made two months ago, well, can you suggest another recipe that I could use for it? Because you know what I have in my pantry and make use of the food that's in your house rather than having to go buy it. And I was really hoping that once I put all of my food into the food list, which wasn't too laborious, but certainly isn't something I'd want to do regularly, it would spit out a meal plan sort of using the food that I had.

7:50And it didn't do that. There were portions where I could go and sort of look in a section where my food was and say, OK, suggest recipes for me. And then I could add those to my favorites and then I could go add those to my meal plan. But, you know, that's a lot of steps. So that was a bit of a that was a bit of a downside. side. And then the other thing that I really think it should do, and I did talk to Nick about this during the process, and I said, is this something you're going to bring to Samsung food? So I abandoned my Amazon A shopping list, which is what I normally use. And I use the Samsung food shopping list.

8:21And then I ordered all the food through the Samsung food app that connects to Instacart. And I said, okay, now shouldn't all of the food I just bought suddenly now be in my food list, right? So I don't have to manually input it. Seems logical. No, it doesn't do that. So that was when I gave up on the food list. I'm not doing this again. It is one of those things, I think, with both recipe collection and that sort of grocery shopping creation side of things, this whole industry is you can see all of the pieces and no one is actually putting any of them together. Like I use this really lovely recipes app called I think it's Mila M E L A.

9:05And it's beautiful. It does a really good job of parsing recipes and putting it in. And it does an awful job of just being like, hey, remember this thing that you've cooked 10 times? Why are you saving another blueberry muffins recipe? You already have one that you seem to like very much. And also, remember how you've made blueberry muffins 11 Sundays in a row? Here's the blueberry muffins recipe. Like, there's just all these little pieces of it that feel like it's actually not more intelligence we need. It's just putting all of these little pieces together, which I guess to some extent is the story of the smart kitchen.

9:37It's all in there. Yes. It's just a matter of making it sort of make sense as a whole. We have the ingredients. We just don't have the finished product. Oh boy. There's a metaphor for you. This just became the most meta episode of the Vergecast we've ever done. I love it. Okay. So that was the beginning of the process, But you acquired food. You had ingredients in your house. What was day one's experience? What did you do the first time? So for some reason, meal plans like to try and start you on a Monday. And I was like, no, no, no, no. I need the weekend for this. So I started on a Saturday and it was actually a holiday weekend.

10:11So, you know, I had plenty of time. And as I mentioned before, I really enjoy cooking. So, you know, this was fun for me to do and to sort of test out all of these gadgets that I hadn't really spent a lot of time with outside of work. and yeah it was the first day was was really kind of fun because I was making dishes I'd never really made myself before because I'm not very good at them and things that my family really enjoys like one of the first things I did on Sunday morning was make biscuits and gravy which is my husband's favorite dish I'm gonna try and make it from scratch using my Thermomix I did not think my Thermomix could make biscuits and gravy but apparently it can and it tells me it will only take me 20 minutes of prep time and then 20 minutes of cooking.

10:52That seems pretty fast for Sunday morning breakfast. Thermomix, my favourite, still my favourite smart kitchen gadget, I have to say, even though it's siloed in its own little ecosystem. But it can't bake, so I got to use my oven for that purpose. And that was where I ran into some issues with voice control. Because this is another area where the smart kitchen feels like it should work well. Voice control is a natural interface you would think for a kitchen where your hands are often busy and you're not holding your phone and it's still tricky there's difficult nomenclature I really struggled to get my oven to preheat using voice commands preheat oven to bake 400 degrees sorry I couldn't find anything to do that to get started you'll need a smart kitchen appliance okay but I have a smart kitchen appliance.

11:42All right. Nomenclature. I am probably saying it wrong. How about just tell my oven to preheat. OK, bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. And this also leads to another issue with the smart kitchen safety. There are so many sort of checks and balances put in by manufacturers, I assume, who want to make sure that I don't maim myself or kill myself or burn my house down, which is fair enough. Seems reasonable. Yeah. But still causes friction. And that's the one thing you don't want in the cooking process is friction. So the voice control, I feel ultimately, and this might be a bit pie in the sky and you can probably shoot it down, but I think voice control would work better in the kitchen if it was in each appliance, as opposed to a universal control that's trying to understand what you're addressing.

12:32So if I could talk to my oven and say preheat to, as opposed to having to ask Alexa to do it for me. And then it had this really annoying thing where it would, if you asked to preheat, it automatically does it at 350 degrees. It didn't let me set what I wanted it to be. And then when I said, okay, don't do that then. I want you to bake at 350 or 375 degrees, which is what I wanted. It does it and it said, okay, I will set the oven for an hour. I didn't tell it to set the oven for an hour. I didn't think about the fact that I told it to set the oven for an hour. Two hours later, when I went to go get my food, it was only half cooked because the oven had turned off in an hour.

13:10So yeah, not a good experience. Yeah. I do agree with you, by the way. One of my most closely held theories about voice assistance is that every device should have its own and you should address the device, not address an assistant about a device. I just think that paradigm just doesn't make sense in a way that I want to look at my TV and say, hey, TV, play ESPN. And I want to look at my oven and say, hey, oven, preheat to 350. That just intuitively makes more sense than saying, you know, hey, tell my GE smart oven to preheat. Like, that's nothing. You've lost me at that point. It is one of those things that the bar for all of this is it has to be easier than walking over to it and pushing the buttons.

13:55And that's a really, really, really, really, really high bar to clear. But if I can look at it from across the kitchen and say preheat to 350, that does it as long as it works. Yes. But it doesn't. I have used individual devices with built-in voice control and they have never been good. You know, that's the hard part here is you're asking a oven manufacturer to come up with a good voice assistant. And I've used it in like robot vacuums and a few other devices. And it's just, you know, Amazon and Google and Apple, to some extent, have nailed a good experience that not always perfect, but it's a lot better than you're going to find most other places.

14:34Although I know Amazon does have this system where you can developers can come to them and ask them to help them make like the Hey Disney is one of those examples. So I could see a future where this becomes possible. And yes, I agree. That would have made the voice experience work in my kitchen. And today, it is not a good experience. So I'm curious at the beginning of this process, how much you had to force yourself to like do the smart thing in the kitchen, like quote unquote smart thing in the kitchen, right? Because we asked you basically go way out of your way to use the smartness of these appliances.

15:10Did it occur to you at the beginning how many times you had to stop and be like, OK, I have to not do this the way I would normally do this, even with the same appliance, in order to do the most technology forward part of this? Yes, a lot. I had to do that a lot. And it was frustrating because this is another issue that I felt was a problem with the smart kitchen is that the app control of appliances is largely pointless. And when it is useful, it does add extra steps. There are two examples. So I have two smart countertop ovens that I've tested. There's the Tavala and the Tyfur. The Tyfur is an air fryer.

15:48It's like a dome air fryer and it is the best air fryer I have ever used. It's awesome. But the app makes no sense. There's just no point to me in using the app. The only thing it can do is send the settings for a recipe I find in its own app, which is limited. And that's somewhat useful, but the control panel is very simple and easy, and it's just as easy to hit the buttons. And so I've had this typhoon for about three weeks and I've been testing it and I never use the app. And for this process, I was like, okay, I've got to make sure to use the app. And it's like, it wouldn't let me preheat.

16:23I had to preheat on the device, then go back to the app, choose the recipe and send those settings once it finished preheating and it was like this is not useful and then with the tavala all you can do is send the settings i can't add cooking time like the tavala is a great little lunchtime cooking machine because you know if you just want to reheat dinner for lunch i don't want to heat up my entire thermidor range so i just use this little countertop oven but sometimes it takes longer and i'm like oh i want to add an extra five minutes from my desk. And I'd love to be able to just press five minutes on the app.

16:59But no, you have to go back to the device and press the button. And it's like, what is the smart element here? There isn't really. And again, this probably goes back to the safety issue. Unattended appliances that can reach over 450 degrees, you know, they want to make sure that you really meant to do that. And I get that. But yeah, that was frustrating. The only benefit I find there with the app is for a more complicated device. So the Instant Pot, for example, which I have, I was testing the Instant Pot Pro Plus, which is Instant Pot's first sort of truly smart device. And it works with Fresco, the smart home, the smart kitchen platform.

17:38And in its app, you, once you choose the recipe, it will send the precise settings to the Instant Pot. And if you've used an Instant Pot, especially one like this that has a big screen with all sorts of complicated settings on, it was so much easier. I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, so nice to be able to just press the button and they all showed up, especially as the Instant Pot is kind of a scary device because when it stops, it lets off all the steam. I put it like in the middle of the counter, like in the middle of my kitchen. I didn't want it near anything that might explode. Yeah.

18:08I'm so hung up on this idea of not being able to preheat stuff remotely because I think to some extent, one of the challenges for the smart kitchen is that you're in your kitchen, typically when you're cooking. One of the reasons I think things like meal planning and grocery shopping for you is interesting is that that is stuff that can theoretically be done without you and that you're actually kind of happy to do remotely. But the odds of you wanting to make dinner without ever setting foot in your kitchen is both implausible and just kind of not realistic, right? But the idea that I should be able to walk into my kitchen and my oven is preheated seems like the simplest, most useful thing to do, right?

18:48Like I made dinner last night and my grill is downstairs in our back patio and our kitchen is upstairs. And all I want in the whole world is to be able to point my phone at my grill and say, grill, turn on while I'm standing in my kitchen prepping stuff. Yeah. And you just can't do that. And part of it is because of these totally valid and maybe slightly overbearing safety things. But all reasons aside, that's the lowest hanging fruit I can think of in the smart kitchen. And we still can't get it. We can't. No, I have. So I have tested the smart Traeger smoker, outdoor smoker, and you can control the entire thing from the app, change settings as it goes, which is great.

19:28But to actually start it, you have to go press the button. It will not let you do it. And the Thermador oven. So when I first got the Thermador, the only remote control option was by turning a dial. to remote control, then you could use your smartphone from anywhere. So I could preheat from anywhere, but I would have had to have remembered to turn the dial to remote control before I left the house, which is not something that's top of my list of things to do. And there has been an update I discovered during this testing that it should allow me to enable permanent remote start through the app. I spent a good half an hour and I couldn't get it to work.

20:08It just wouldn't let me do it. I don't know. Maybe this is something that's coming soon and they just didn't make that clear enough in the app. So I was actually watching my son play tennis and the match was going long and I knew I had a chicken enchilada ready to cook. I was going to start cooking chicken enchiladas when I got home. I knew it was going to be a long process. So I was like, okay, I'll preheat the oven from the app while I'm watching tennis and no luck. So, you know, I had to do the fallback, which was text my husband and tell him to get off the couch and go preheat. There's the smart kitchen right there.

20:40That works, too. Now you're talking. OK, so what else did you make over the course of this experiment? I won't make you go day by day, but did you have any particularly telling experiences? What else did you make? Oh, gosh, I made. So for the long holiday weekend, I did a Saturday morning frittata. That was kind of fun because what I did there was I used, so Samsung Food has this feature where you can take a picture of ingredients and it will suggest recipes for you. So, I mean, it's limited usefulness, I suppose, because, you know, you could just Google, okay, I have eggs, I have pork. But it was kind of fun.

21:17Which is a great way to cook, by the way. I've actually had a lot of fun being like, I have half a pound of ground turkey, this Korean barbecue sauce that I forgot about, and bok choy. What can I make? What can I make? And you just sort of make whatever comes up. It's actually a pretty fun way to kind of empty the fridge of all the strange stuff you have. Yeah. And that was, you know, that was what I did with this. So I do a CSA and I live in the South and I often get a lot of random vegetables that I have no idea what to do with. Although, unfortunately, Samsung Food did not know what to do with most of them either because they were a bit random.

21:51But it gave me inspiration, I would say, as opposed to effectively giving me a good dish. I had pork, I had ground pork, I had eggs I just got for my chickens and I had some vegetables and some potatoes and it thought it was minced beef, not pork. You know, it didn't get everything right, but it did come up with an idea of the frittata using the potatoes and the eggs. So I ended up doing a nice frittata, which is something I used to cook all the time and I'd sort of forgotten about. So that was nice kind of getting the inspiration. And then what else did I do? So on the big sort of holiday lunch, I had planned to do a smoked pork butt.

22:29So I've been testing the GE profile indoor smart smoker, which again is connected, but connectivity is relatively limited, doesn't really do a lot for me. But it is a really interesting piece of tech being able to use a smoker indoors. I mean, I'm lucky enough to have a backyard where I can use a smoker. But I know I've heard a lot of people that were very excited about the prospect of being able to, you know, smoke some smoke some butt indoors. There are a lot of people with like smokers on fire escapes and all kinds of deeply dangerous things going on just in the name of the flavor. This is also an example of a smart appliance that I was hoping would help me cook better because barbecue is an art.

23:10And, you know, again, live in the South. I'm familiar. There's a lot of barbecue places around here. And I love me some brisket and some good pulled pork. And I did try brisket. I did try pulled pork, smoked butt, and none of it worked out very well. Oh, no. How come? What happened? I don't know. I put it in there for the 10 hours that it told me to. And in the end, it just came out kind of rubbery and overcooked. So there could have been user error. But I think one of the things I was frustrated with with this device compared to, say, the Traeger, which I've used before, the outdoor one, the Traeger will automatically adjust the time and the temperature based on the probe.

23:51Whereas this device, you had to monitor it and adjust it yourself. And I think that was probably where the user error came in at some point that I didn't top up the pellets fast enough. So it stopped smoking and just started cooking, which probably overcooked it. But yeah, that was unfortunately wasn't a huge success. But then I did salvage it and this was kind of fun. So the next day I decided to make faux ramen where you put like all fun things in noodle soup. And I'd never made that before. And my husband loves it. And so I sliced the top of the pork butt off and turned it into pork belly to put in my ramen.

24:30So, you know, I did things that I hadn't, I would never have thought about doing before because, you know, I gave myself the time and the tools. because making chocolate mousse is not an easy process if you aren't used to hand whisking egg whites and heating chocolate at really high temperatures. And that I could use a Thermomix for. So a lot of the devices that I had, like the Thermomix, the GE Profile, Smart Mix Stand Mixer, the Air Fryer and the Instapot, it did enable me to do things that I would not have been able to do before. But this goes back to the issue that we've talked about in the past is these are great individual smart gadgets to have in your kitchen.

25:10Smart, not just because they're connected to Wi-Fi, but because they are adding something to the process. They're making the process easier. So you can create more fun foods at home and have more joy out of your cooking. But they were all really quite siloed in their own ecosystems. And as soon as I get out of the Thermomix world or out of the Instapot world, I have to start all over with another app or another voice control. And so that interoperability was something that I still came up against at every step of the way. There is no real solution yet to that. But individual devices in the smart kitchen are fun if you have enough counter space.

25:51That is a perfect segue. We need to take a break really fast, but then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about some of the takeaways and what we can all learn and smarten up in our kitchens about this. We'll be right back.