A new smart kitchen assistant that can plan your week’s meals, order the ingredients and tell you how to cook them could soon revolutionise the way consumers cook at home.
Hello Egg, which integrates with the Eggspert web and mobile app, is described as ‘the only voice-operated smart assistant with a display and personality designed specifically for the kitchen’.
The gadget can plan a schedule of meals for the week according to your dietary preferences, arrange for the ingredients to be delivered, supervise your food cupboards, and even adapt to unexpected events like an impromptu dinner with a vegetarian friend. It accommodates vegan, gluten-free and lactose-free diets – and features step-by-step, voice-navigated recipe tutorials projected from its unique internal projection screen.
And Hello Egg is loaded with a number of cool features that you’d expect to find on standard voice-activated assistants, including music streaming, audio news feeds, weather forecasts, and multiple voice-activated timers for the kitchen.
It has been developed by IoT technology company RnD64, and will be debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas tomorrow.
Dmytro Shemet, CEO of the company that developed Hello Egg, said: “The initial tests of Hello Egg went significantly well and the feedback we received after the product announcement has confirmed the need for a dedicated smart cooking assistant. With Eggspert, we apply AI not only to facilitate the user’s kitchen experience but also to analyse their nutritional needs and optimise their cooking process on every level.”
The developers believe that demand is there from consumers; according to research, more than nine in ten Americans aged 25-34 agree that home cooking is healthier than eating out, but less than 60% of dinners eaten in the home are cooked there. That’s down from 71% in 1985 – and, at that rate, home-cooked meals could account for less than half of all dinners eaten in the home within 30 years, unless something changes.
The same number – 60% – say that a lack of time is the main reason they choose not to cook at home.
“Hello Egg is reintroducing home cooking to the modern millennial’s life by making meal planning, ingredient delivery and cooking assistance smart and flexible,” it said.
The gizmo is 8 inches in height and made from glossy black plastic.
It is a promising sign for the smart assistants, which have an increasingly promising role to play in the food and beverage industry.
Last month, Domino’s Pizza announced that it had added Google Home, the technology giant’s new voice-activated speakers, to its list of ordering options in the US.
It joins a range of other ordering platforms that allow consumers to order Domino’s through their smart watches and smart TVs, by text, on Twitter, on Facebook Messenger and through a new zero-click app that, once opened, provides a ten-second countdown before automatically sending a saved order through to the user’s nearest restaurant.
According to digital advertising company Equimedia, alternative e-commerce platforms like chat bots and Facebook messenger could form a major part of how consumers interact with brands in the future.
READ MORE Four ways that smart tech is shaping the kitchen of the future
Find out how clever technology is changing the way we cook at home – from fridges that order your groceries for you to smart chopping boards and cookers.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024