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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

> Family Hub™ refrigerators[4] with AI Vision Inside technology will receive upgrades to enable recognition of frequently used packaged foods and even more fresh fruits and vegetables to help families reduce food waste and save money.

This has to be one of the silliest solutions in search of a problem I've ever seen. The fridge costs $3000, by the way.

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I'm working part time at an appliance showroom, it's exactly as silly as it sounds. We don't sell fruits and veggies, but we did have some pumpkins around. Put one in, it's confident I just fed it either an apple, an orange, or an onion. Some bottled drinks? Clearly a mango. Maybe an eggplant.

And it can't register anything placed in the flex drawer, freezer, or fridge doors. In order to actually take advantage of its fridge inventory system, you still have to manually enter in or correct every single item you place into your fridge.

It's inconvenient for looking up recipes, since fridges are not placed for visibility from your countertop. It can be used for music but the speakers aren't worth the extra money. Videos and movies? The screen's the wrong aspect ratio for anything but big screen TikTok. And again, fridges are not positioned to gather around.

And that last bit is the crux of the issue. I've talked to our Samsung reps and they keep talking about fridges like they're gathering points. Like people congregate around their fridges. That was the guiding principle behind this fridge, and it's so disconnected from reality that the appliance itself can't help but be irredeemably pointless.

How does it work in practice? Do you have to scan an item when you put it in or take it of the fridge?

Because in practice, fridges look nothing like in the commercials. Very few people would put a whole apple and a carton of milk on a shelf and nothing more. That would be highly uneconomical, because there's far too much air that will escape when you open and close the door.

It is normal to have lots and lots of small boxes and other stuff stacked on each other which would make it hard if not impossble to operate a camera inside.

I've never used one other than demoing the features, but not well. The camera can't actually see what's inside the fridge. The camera sits between the two doors on the top bevel, pointing down.

As you cross the threshold of the fridge with your item, you have to pause to show the camera what you're putting in or taking out. If you don't pause, or if it just nondeterministically decides you weren't holding anything, it won't work. It has no idea where items are in the fridge, as soon as the threshold is crossed it loses sight of them.

There is one exception, and that's the fridge doors. The camera can't see that far up and out, but it takes multiple snapshots of the doors as you're closing them and bringing them within its field of view. The results are heavily distorted, incredibly low fidelity, and most likely very motion blurry. Too low quality for the fridge to even attempt to discern what's inside the door, it'll just show you the snapshot it took and let you figure it out by navigating Home > AI Vision Inside > Left Door/Right Door to see the low quality reconstruction of your door... or you could take that time instead to just open the door.

> Like people congregate around their fridges

In my experience they do. At least at parties, cause that's where the beer is kept.

A smart fridge tracking the contents and doing facial recognition on who's opening it sounds awesome.

Then it can alert everyone Tom just stole Bob's IPA sounds very useful, to avoid those awkward "who stole my beer" moments.

That would be great. That's not what's being sold nowadays. There's no tracking of who did what, the camera points pretty much straight down and it only even works if you pause and explicitly show to it the object that you are putting in/taking out.

I put fliers for our store warranty inside, and just hid them under my wrist while taking them out so they show up in the AI Vision Inside app without actually taking up space in the fridge. The only time it ever saw me is when I leaned too far in and it took a picture of the back of my head. Got classified as a kiwi.

I found it hilarious that they're bragging about how "AI Vision Inside will now recognize 37 fresh food items, including..." I don't think this was impressive even five years ago, but it's certainly not impressive now.

Sure if I want to "save money", I will buy a fridge for $3000, totally makes sense.

Strawberries are as low as $1 a pound at Felipe's.

I think there's some potential here, with regards to keeping track of when things were added/might go bad. At least for me, who easily forgets things until it's too late.

A thing that can read the expiry dates on food packages that take me 20 minutes to find because they're printed in light gray on gray background would be useful.

It would be. That was the original promise of the Family Hub+ fridges with AI Vision Inside™ technology.

But you won't find that here, and it's not going to be coming in an update. This fridge can't properly identify fruits and veggies, let alone anything in any sort of packaging.

As I demo the thing, it keeps taking snapshots of the back of my head and insists that the fridge is just packed full of kiwis.

Aye, the original version of my comment had "If it's reliable enough" as a qualifier.

> full of kiwis

Also this is utterly hilarious to me.

Folks seem to use tools like grocy.

If a Fridge had a barcode scanner built into it, that might be a start.

Put a magnetic whiteboard on the fridge. Write what you got when shopping and when you got it. 2 dollar solution, no invasive AI bullshit.

You don’t even need a whiteboard, just write directly on the fridge.

That would require I remember to do that, too ;)

I was only commenting on the usefulness of such features, not on whether companies would also abuse that access for more data; that is an issue, but a separate one.

I'm saying they aren't useful or needed. They're solutions inventing problems to solve to justify higher prices, subscription models, and data collection.

I'm a software engineer. I like technology. But there is absolutely no reason for a fridge or a washing machine to be "smart". I just makes them worse, not better.

Usefulness is relative to each user.

I'm a software engineer who likes technology too. I think such things would be useful. I guess I'm just objectively wrong?

And like... food going bad is a problem that actually exists, so I'm not sure what you mean by "inventing problems"

It's a lot of complexity and engineering just to avoid giving food the ol' sniff test. Tech bros need to stop inventing problems for which we already have time-tested solutions.

By then it's already too late. Not a very useful test to reduce food waste!

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