The Vergecast - How smart is the smart kitchen, really?

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy has as smart a kitchen as any reasonable person possibly could; she has smart appliances, a smart sink, a smart fridge, and more voice assistants than anyone could ever talk to. And for a few days, she tried to let her kitchen do the work: telling her what to cook, getting everything set up just right, and even taking some of the cooking and cleaning load off her shoulders. Jen kept a diary during her adventures, and then joined The Vergecast to tell the tale. The fun, frustrating, exciting, harrowing tale. Links: The Thermomix The Samsung Food app The Fresco app The GE Profile Smart Smoker The Smart Instapot Pro The Traeger Smart Wood Pellet Grill The Typhur Smart Air Fryer Tovala Smart Countertop Oven My favorite smart oven is toast Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Android fridges. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm here with Jen Patterson-Tooey. 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. And 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 memos 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 of 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. do any of the features that they have. So 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, because that sort of seemed to be a theme that has emerged in the smart kitchen. It's not so much that the kitchen's 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 sort of 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? Like, 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 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 broad a look at this did you feel like you could take going in? Yeah. Now, 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. I don't get away with cereal for dinner. That was sort of very core to the experiment for me was,

can this be better than it was before? Because I have never successfully managed to meal plan. It's time consuming and tiresome and can be kind of expensive. In the end, it 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. That 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 review, 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. Right? 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. And I, over those two years, more features have come. I can now voice control my oven to an extent. And the smart fridge can now recognise 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, hmm, 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. And 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 pocket. 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. And 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, okay, 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 downside. And then the other thing that I really think it should do, and 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 used. And I used the Samsung food shopping list. And 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 M-E-L-A. and 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. Like, it's all in there. Yes. It's just a matter of making it sort of makes 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. So, 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 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 Sunday morning was make biscuits and gravy, which is my husband's favourite dish. I'm going to 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. That 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. 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. All right. Nomenclature, I am probably saying it wrong. How about just...

Tell my oven to preheat. Okay, 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 do. 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. So if I could talk to my oven and say, preheathe me. 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 it pre-heat, 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 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 was, when I went to go get my food, it was only half cooked because the oven had turned off in an hour. Oh, geez. So, yeah, not a good experience. Yeah. I do agree with you, by the way. One of my most closely held theories about voice assistants is that every device should have its own and you should address the device, not address an assistant about a device.

Yes. 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. I want to look at my oven and say, hey, oven, preheat to 350. That's just, that just intuitively makes more sense than saying, you know, hey, mm-hmm, tell my GE smart oven to pre-like, that's nothing. You've lost me at that point. Yes. 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.

And 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 pre-heat 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. Although 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 kid, like, quote unquote, smart thing in the kids. 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.

Did it occur to you at the beginning how many times you had to stop and be like, okay, 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 Tuvala and the Typhur. The Typhur is an air friar. It's like a dome air friar. And it is the best air friar 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 had kind of, I've had this type for about three weeks and I've been testing it. And I never use the app. And I, 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. I 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 Tovala, all you can do is send the settings. I can't add cooking time. Like the Tovala is a great little lunchtime cooking machine. Because 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 air. but 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 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 Kitchen Platform. And in its app, 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 easy. I had no idea what I was doing. It was like, it was so nice to be able to just press the button. And they all showed up, especially. is 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 don't want it near anything that might explode. Yeah. I'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?

Like 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. No. 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 Trager smoker, outdoor smoker, and you can control. the entire thing from the app, change settings as it goes, which is great. But to actually start it, you have to go press the button. It will not let you do it.

And the thermidor oven, so when I first got the Thermidor, 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 to. 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. It 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 at 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 and chaladas 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 foreback, which was text my husband and tell him to get off the couch and go preheat the house. There's the smart kitchen right there. That works too. Now you're talking. Okay, 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 satay morning for tartar. 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, I have, but it was kind of fun. Which 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? 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. But 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. So 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 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. And, 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, you know, there could have been user error. But I think one of the things I was frustrated with with this device compared to, say, the Trager, which I've used before,

the outdoor one. So the Traeger will automatically adjust the time and the temperature based on the probe, whereas this device, it would just, 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. And 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. So, 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 moose 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 Friar 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 that issue that we've talked about in the past is these are great individual smart gadgets to have in your kitchen. smart 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 for 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. That 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.

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So, Jen, you've been through this whole experience. It sounds like it has been mostly interesting. I was going to say mostly good, but I'm not even sure that's true. But it has certainly been interesting. Let's talk about some takeaways from all of this, because I think there are a lot of people who are looking around at their kitchen trying to figure out what is useful to invest time and money and energy into figuring out what apps should I download on my phone.

Let's help the people out here a little bit. So the first thing is, is smartening up your kitchen as much as possible a good idea? Is this a goal people should have for their lives at this moment in time to try and get a very smart kitchen? No. Okay. Because things don't all work together, it can create chaos. If you have too many smart devices, too many smart cooks in the kitchen, spoil the broth. Your oatmeal timer is done.

Your oatmeal timer is done. Okay, it's mild chaos in here. because my oatmeal timer is apparently done. My robot vacuum decided to start vacuuming because it's Monday morning. And at some point, my oven turned itself off. And I don't know why. Okay. So if in theory we're going to pick just one device to start with.

I have a feeling I know the answer to this question based on the many ways you have recommended the thermomix in the past. But it does feel like the place to start is pick one or two of these kind of multi-purpose, do lots of things, ideally interact with an app or each other or whatever, but start sort of appliance by appliance rather than thinking about your kitchen holistically. Where would you tell most people to start? Yeah, I think it's, we're still a ways from the point where our holistic kitchen works well together. So, you know, I would, if you're going out and buying new kitchen equipment, if you're going to remodel your kitchen, I would definitely get an oven that has Wi-Fi connectivity because we know we're going to have better capabilities in this.

future and you can turn it off until you want it. You know, you don't have to connect it to the internet. But in terms of today, if you want to get a gadget that's going to improve your cooking experience, the thermomix is a great device. It is very expensive, though. I will caveat with that. It's a $500 or something, right? Uh-huh. But it does a lot. It's like seven things in one. And one of the great things about, and this is sort of what I feel like is a sort of goal for all smart kitchen appliances is that it does make the cooking process easier and it helps you do things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to have done before because of, and it keeps it all in one device. So clean up is minimal. This is an area we have not fixed. My kitchen is a mess right now.

In fact, would you come and help me clean up? No, no thanks. Because, yeah, chaos rains when you do a lot of cooking in your house. And yes, we have the dishwasher, but someone still has to load it and unload it. And yeah, I did not find a solution to keeping my kitchen clean other than running my robot vacuum cleaner, which got in my way a lot. But yes, as a single device, and the thermomix actually has guided cooking. This was the one area I did find has improved significantly in my testing this last week. Guided cooking has become a lot better. I used to use smart displays to try and do some guided cooking, like Amazon's and Google's have these functions built in. And that's mostly you just kind of like load the thing and sort of

swipe from step to step in the recipe, right? Okay. And it can also sometimes read out the steps for you and my fridge can read out the steps for me, but it does it really fast, really, really quickly and it's not very pleasant experience. But the thermomix has a built-in screen with the guided steps. So as you go along, you're just following the guided steps. And that I I find a very, very useful in my experimenting. And the fresco app is probably the one that I found that had the best guided cooking experience. Okay, so that is the in-app timer on the Fresco app is showing the step by step with the ingredients for each step,

which is key because you know when you're reading recipe and it says add the flour and you're like, well, how much flour was it? And then you scroll all the way back up and find the amount. This has the amount with the ingredient and the step plus a little button for starting a timer for the amount of time the recipe called for that step, which is kind of ingenious, and I'm surprised no one's done this before. So, so far, this is pretty good.

What about the flip side? Is there a gadget that you are desperate to get rid of and stop having on your counter, either because it's bad or because it's just been sort of useless to you in real life? I need to cut down on my counter clutter, and at this stage, what I would really like, and this is maybe a future, a bit too, far in the future, but I want my oven to do everything that the typhir and the thermomix and the Tuvala and the Instapot does. I'm like, could there not be a way that these capabilities could all be in the biggest,

most powerful, most expensive? Because as you have pointed out to me before, all these air friars are just fancy convection ovens, which is a thing that your oven can theoretically do. Well, and actually, to that point, one of the things I meant to ask you about earlier is you and I have both had these years-long obsessions with these all-in-one little ovens that are like the size of a toaster oven, but are super smart. So they've had the ones that have the cameras that you put it in and it knows you're making chocolate chip cookies and it'll just bake the chocolate chip cookies for you. That feels like magic to me, right? Like make that the size of my oven and that's what I want.

I want to open it up. I want to put it in and I want to have the oven know what to do. And that seems like where we should be headed. But you haven't once mentioned one of these little mini all in one smart ovens. And it does sort of feel like a dying thing. Literally. I mean, the June is literally dead, which is very sad. That's right.

Just recently, right? Just recently, like, unofficially confirmed that they're not going to make another one and you can't buy one. And when I remodeled my kitchen, I didn't have the space, but my ideal had been to do built-ins and to build in two June ovens. That was one I wanted to do. But you can't do that. they're not, June oven never made that capability. It has to be a countertop oven. There is no smart built-in oven that I was able to buy when I remodeled my kitchen. I know Samsung now has one, and I think there's actually this last week at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show. I think

there was quite a lot being shown off in this space, but those are also a level above, price-wise and feature-wise. But yeah, I could imagine, you know, a big range with like four compartments that could do all these different things, have these different functions. And also, I want my stovetop to be smart. I want my stovetop to be able to tell me when the water's boiled over and turn itself off. And, you know, there's so many features that I feel like we could just put all into one big appliance in our kitchen and not have to have all of these small countertop pieces. As much fun as they are and useful as they are, we just don't have the space for them, or the outlets. I run out of outlets very quickly.

Oh, no, I absolutely feel that. I have, I bought a milk frother, which is a ridiculous thing to own. And I pay for said ridiculousness every time I want to use it because I have to unplug some other appliance in order to plug in the milk frother. That is actually my favorite smart kitchen device that we haven't even talked about is my, I do have a smart coffee maker. And that again is a space that hasn't really taken off. There was one, Bosch showed one off at CES this year that you could actually, the first time you could use voice control on a countertop coffee maker to so. you could say, hey, Amazon's A, make me an espresso. And, you know, that is the dream. Yeah. You've been able to do it with the really, really expensive, fancy built-in ones. But I have a GE profile, little mini espresso maker. And it's smart in that I can customize my cup. But I can't talk to it.

And this would be a great device for our built-in voice assistant, I think. One day, one day I can walk into the kitchen and just be like, jeevs, make me a coffee. It's the dream. And that is another one that is kind of a little tiny closed ecosystem and you could see how it would work. And I think I know a lot of folks who bought the very sort of simple timer coffee maker and it's like you put the beans in at night and you say at 630, brew me some coffee. And that is that's a thing you can do. And it actually works pretty well. And I think it's very cool.

If you remember to set it. Well, right. It's like turning your oven to remote control. Right. You have to do that one bit of thing. But again, it's the same thing as meal planning, Jen. just that one added tiny bit of proactivity in my life and I would be a better happier person. Well, that really gets to the heart of my kind of overall takeaway here was that while I found that like the meal planning was easier and helped expand my repertoire and kind of breaked me out of the cooking route that you mentioned and, you know, I spent a lot more time cooking and I, you know, I felt good about cooking for my family as opposed to buying pizza.

I didn't feel it was sustainable though. Like when I went to the next weekend, so to sit down a meal pan again, I was like, this is a lot of work. And then, so what I came down to at the end is that right now, I'm the connective tissue of my smart kitchen. I'm the connection between the apps, the voice control, the appliances, the grocery store. I need something to come in and help fill some of those roles.

You know, ultimately, you know, the Rosie, the Robot. I know we're a few years away from that, all the robotic arms to do some of the work. But I also feel like, and this is something that Ben and Nick talked to a bit in our last interview with them, is that this is probably where generative AI is really going to come in and kind of move the needle on the smart kitchen in terms of helping pull all those pieces and parts together and taking some of that mental load away from you. And then combined with the interoperability, we're beginning to see between appliances with the Home Connectivity Alliance matter. and then what Fresco is doing with its app. And I know I say this all the time, but we're so close.

Don't say matter, Jet, don't do it. Don't do it. We're close. We're a lot closer than we were 10 years ago. I just feel like we didn't take as much, there hasn't been as much movement in the last decade as I had genuinely hoped there would be. I put off redoing my smart kitchen,

my kitchen as long as I possibly could. Is there anything that came out of this that you learned, that you're like, okay, I will actually pull this back into my real life as a real person. Yeah, I do think I will keep using the Samsung food app. I did actually find that useful. And I actually used my smart fridge's screen much more in the last week than I have in the entire five years that I've had it. Okay, so using the screen here on my fridge has actually been very handy for cooking this recipe.

I can see the entirety of the ingredients on one screen, and it stays on, unlike my phone or iPad, which keeps locking itself. So I have to keep pressing, putting my code in or trying to get my face in the right angle. I will. My next recipe, I'm going to try one of the smart displays because for memory, those will stay fixed while you're following a recipe, and they can call out the steps to you,

whereas for the fridge I had to keep coming back and checking. But it worked pretty well. It was useful on that big screen, and it does make me think, and this is something that Ben discussed last week, that ultimately we do need a central kitchen interface. Maybe that's one of those things that could replace the connective tissue that I mentioned about, a central sort of dashboard for your smart kitchen. Once we have the interoperability, and once we have maybe the generative AI being able to help with a lot of these tasks, having one central dashboard where you can control all of your appliances, read your recipes,

yes, watch TikTok when you're waiting for that timer to finish. I do feel like that is something we are going to need. I felt like we moved away from it because everyone was like, this is a bad idea. But I don't see another solution yet. Here's my question about that, though. Is that a screen built into one of your appliances? And in that case, I think the fridge is very natural, right? Like one thing you and I agree on is that the TV as a center of a smart home is a really interesting, powerful thing.

because it's this giant screen in the middle of your home that can do a lot of stuff. And I think the kitchen, that's the fridge, right? That is the thing. It is always within arm's reaches during the kitchen, unless you have a weird kitchen. It's just huge. It's right there. It makes a lot of sense that the fridge would be the thing. And yet, I want to upgrade most of my screens a lot more often than I want to upgrade

my kitchen. So my question is, is that some appliance maker who will build that thing? Or is that an iPad or a pixel tablet? I mean, Google made the pixel tablet, like, pretty clearly as a smart home thing. And you just reviewed Amazon's Echo Hub, which is very much after the same thing. Like, is this a whole category of device that a kitchen maker needs to figure out? Or is this just a tablet that understands my kitchen? Yeah.

Actually, when I was reviewing the Echo Hub, I did try and put it on the wall in my kitchen because it did feel like it would be a great device to have in the kitchen. Yeah, stick a magnet on that thing? Yeah. Put it right on the fridge. I love it. So Samsung's in a unique position because it's an electronics company. and an appliance manufacturer.

So it kind of had, it was in a good position to do this. And they've done a good job with it and they've iterated. But I agree that the idea of having one screen that you rely on to run your entire kitchen in your appliance is kind of a scary one. But the flip side would be small screens in every appliance, which is actually what Samsung's doing and they showed at CES. And those screens all communicate with each other. So you're not dealing with a new interoperative. face every time you move around the kitchen. But you do have to have all smart things appliances or Samsung appliances.

I kind of hate that outcome. I'm not going to lie. This idea of everything has its own little screen and touch universe is not what I'm after. I don't know that an iPad is a solution either. I don't, you know, something that's portable is going to walk out of the kitchen. Right. True. Or its battery dies or whatever.

Yes. I think something that is permanently in the kitchen, but that is upgradable and swappable is where we will probably get to rather than it being in appliances, because once you have interoperability, once matter and the home connectivity alliance brings everything, hopefully, to a point where all your appliances can talk to each other, then you don't need a proprietary tablet in your fridge. You can use any device. And I think we might start to see people kind of fill this niche and come up with dedicated sort of kitchen smart home control panels. And that's what I felt like I needed, actually, this last week was just that extra interface where everything all, everything was worked together

in one space and I didn't have to kind of run around and deal with lots of different appliances. Yeah. And especially if I can have that thing without worrying about getting flour and olive oil all over my very expensive iPad. Like now we're talking. I'm into that. What about the software side of this? Before we go, we should talk about this. You mentioned Samsung food as an app that you have used and liked. I think one of the challenges of the smart kitchen is that it demands you have a home screen full of apps to control all of your individual things. But did you find anything that A, either does a good job of putting that stuff together or B, just feels like awesome smart kitchen software that everybody should know about? So I did enjoy the Samsung food app. I did not

enjoy the ads. Lots of ads. You can pay to get rid of them. I do feel like the Fresco's Kitchen OS is probably our best experience I had. And I had two experiences with that. One, we talked about the guided recipe, which was really useful. And that works with any recipe that you can import into the Fresco app and then it sort of strips it and does the whole process of turning it into a guided recipe for you, which was useful. But what Fresco does with its Kitchen OS is it uses its interface in appliance manufacturers apps. And in my two to five years of testing smart kitchen appliances. I have yet to come across a smart appliance kitchen, a smart kitchen appliances app that is any good. They are all useless. They're badly laid out. They don't have good interfaces. They're hard to

understand. And so what Fresco is doing with its kitchen OS is trying to make that a uniform experience, no matter what device you're using, it uses the same interface. And that's a huge step forward, I think in the Smart Kitchen because as it is, most of our appliances have confusing interfaces. Like, I still haven't figured out how to use 80% of what my microwave can do because I don't know. The touch panel, it's not a touch panel. It's a B, B, B, B panel. And it's not intuitive. So yeah, I really, I was impressed. I used the Kitchen OS interface in the Instant Pot app. And it was definitely gave me a feeling of like, okay, someone has solved this. let's just hope more manufacturers will use this and put it into their apps rather than trying to come up and reinvent the wheel every time because that's where we end up with it's complicated and confusing and I just don't want to use an app anymore.

I just going to go press the button on the device and probably set it wrong and burn my toast. Yeah, I like the idea of thinking about how do we make it so that you are less the connective tissue of the smart kitchen because the individual things are getting smarter. And I think, I mean, this is why I'm glad we had been on last week to talk about kind of what it means to unify all this stuff across systems. And they're very bullish on AI as the solution. And we'll see about that. I have a lot of feelings about generative AI as the solution to everything. But yeah, I have really come to believe that relying on appliance manufacturers to build great software is just not going to work. And that's okay.

Their job is not to build great software. Their job is to build washing machines and blenders. And that's good and fine. And what we need is the layer that comes in. And I feel like we've spent the last decade getting a lot of versions of that layer that haven't really worked. And whether it's matter or a kitchen OS or something else, it does feel like everyone at least knows that's the thing now. And that's where we unlock a lot of what comes next in the Saurk Kitchen. For sure.

We just need to bring it all together. And the smart fridge needs to move beyond just Samsung too. Like they've done a great job here. it didn't start out well, but it's getting better. And they've persevered. LG just kind of stopped with smart fridges and World Pool and GE. I just haven't seen much innovation in the sort of smart kitchen space for cooking. And there's been a lot of innovation in technology, just not in making it a seamless experience the way we've been talking about it.

And we need a fridge that can tell us what food we have and when it's going to expire. what you need to buy because, you know, that's not just about convenience, but solves a huge issue around food waste. And as we talked about, healthy eating, there's just so, there's so much potential there. And I just feel like the other appliance manufacturers do kind of need to step up here because not everyone's going to buy the Samsung Smart Fridge. Yeah, we talk a lot on this show about, like, the increasingly boring state of smartphones. Like, phones are becoming appliances. Like, let's make appliances gadgets again. You know what I mean? Yes.

I like it. I want Tim Cook to be on stage in three years being like, we've done it. We've made the apple fridge. And everybody's like, oh, my God. Like, that's what we're going for, Jen. These are the rules. All right, we got to get out of here. Jen, this has been a pleasure.

Thank you for going through this insane process for our pleasure. I apologize to you and your family. Oh, they loved it. They got to eat all the food. They got ramen. They got pork belly. Everybody wins. All right.

Well, as always, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for doing this with us. Thanks so much, David. It's been fun and experience. That's it for the Vergecast today, and that is it for our mini-series about the Smart Kitchen. If you didn't catch the first episode, please do. It's a couple episodes back in the feed. We had a ton of fun.

It's a really great episode. Thanks so much to Jen for doing this with us, and thanks to everybody who has helped us make this and participated and dealt with all of Jen's troubleshooting over the last couple of weeks in the Smart Kitchen. There is tons more on all of our smart home coverage, Smart Home Week is happening on Theverge.com. Tons of great stories, tons of good stuff going on. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also check the website.

Lots of good stuff coming. As always, if you have thoughts or questions or feelings or gadgets that you think Jen should try and incorporate it into her life and we can make her life very complicated as a result, always get in touch. Email us, Vergecast to the verge.com. Call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. This series has been fun.

I think we're going to do more like it in the future. So keep your ideas coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpour. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will be back with regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday and Friday, and we have a big show coming up at South by Southwest. Lots of fun stuff coming up. We'll see you then.

Rock and roll.