Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?
I am always on the lookout to automatate as much boring, everyday tasks. A Smart Fridge like that would allow you to generate shopping lists and reduce food waste by alerting you to possible soon-to-be-spoiled food.
A bit like what roombas are doing for cleaning. You still need to do it yourself a bit, but they help.
Not necessary, not even a gamechanger but another neat home automation. Would be nice, sad to hear they don't work well.
I even store produce (ex onions) on the counter tops, so I guess smart counters as well
A car is a half solution to going to work. A stove is a half solution to preparing food.
Half solutions are what people need. They’re the solutions we are using every day.
There is this huge problem with advertising that makes consumers think a half solution is a 100% solution. Most smart product makers do that trick. But, apart from that problem, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’
Edit: but no way would I buy any smart or connected fridge from Samsung. I don’t anticipate that being a positive experience
> A stove is a half solution to preparing food.
A working grocery tracking system is a half-solution to effortless shopping.
A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.
>A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.
Yes. Something designed to be a half solution can be useful. But a full solution which is broken is probably worse than useless.
Me too. I think I’m not communicating clearly. Sorry.
What I’m talking about is a system that does only one third of the steps in the total end-to-end process for ALL your groceries. You do the rest yourself, or use other help.
I’m not advocating a broken system that claims to do that complete process, but really ignores two thirds of your groceries. That would be damn stupid.
Do you understand what I mean?
It might actually be easier to start with the smart pantry! An in-cabinet kit that can be tested entirely dry and warm and open, and then expanded to the fridge.
The fridge/pantry camera is a useful addition, but most of the value would be a system that just tracks what I put in/take out.
2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.
I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.
Or you didn't finish the milk, but didn't realize it had gone bad until after you got home with ingredients for a meal depending on milk.
Maybe we could do better. Maybe we can automate this as well.
And obviously you just walk anywhere and everywhere. Wouldn't want your legs to grow feeble and useless. Even riding a bicycle is reducing how much exercise you'd get otherwise, it's simply a tool for the weak.
Now we have generations of people who grew up with surveillance capitalism and broken promises I wonder what the next big wave will be
Perhaps it's because I'm the cook of the family, but to my mind, if you're in your kitchen on a daily basis, it's incredibly easy to have a strong idea of what you have at home when you're at the store. It's never perfect and once in a while you double up or miss things, but that's life!
We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
My wife cooks sometimes too, but usually it's fairly easy for me to observe what she made and have a good sense of what went into the meal.
>We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
Same for us. I wanted to make pinto bean tacos last night but forgot the pinto beans at the store last weekend, because I'd assumed we'd had some. We used it as an opportunity to pivot and have a random meal that involved using up extras in our pantry and freezer. Life will always have annoying moments that aren't always ideal, there's no amount of automation that will eliminate them. It's good for us to experience those moments and use them as growth opportunities (not saying you don't, I'm just speaking generally here).
And costs you nothing. Is easy to roll out. Doesn't ever need replacement. Doesn't ever fall apart. Lasts forever.
The smart fridge will also screw up and not get it all right 100% of the time. And for that, it will cost you handsomely, will be difficult to implement in all your kitchen, will need constant replacement, will fall apart, will not last forever.
Framed like this, the smart solution is actually worse.
Point is things advance. the first iteration might be as bad as you say, but they are likely to fix the bugs and make it better over time.
Anything you've prepared at home will also not be tracked by such a system.
It’s “wouldn’t this hypothetical feature be great” vs “my feeble mind cannot even imagine why anyone would ever want that”
Actually a cheap microcontroller and a few cameras over the lifetime of the fridge that caused me to open it say 50% less would save more money than it would waste by my estimate.
> If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least
Yeah.
Step 1: fridge with smart inventory
Step 2: hook it up to grok bot
Step 3: grok bot orders your food from Walmart+ InHome
So every piece of this exists except the hypothetical sci-fi fridge.
Again, I’m stunned by the complete and utter lack of imagination and critical thinking here. You guys are the offshore contractors of HN commenting.
> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what?
This is actually a pretty good point. Many people do have poor memory for a plethora of reasons. This would be a great accessibility feature.
You can’t be a software developer with such a poor imagination and intuition. Debugging would be hell for you. Even worse because you’d fail to imagine the edge cases ahead of time.
I take it you've only ever lived alone then? Its pretty easy for someone in my household to consume food or add food without me knowing about it. And I definitely do not take a full and complete inventory every time I open the fridge.
I'd find it very handy to look at a glance and see the current stock of stuff I have in my house. I definitely don't know exactly how much butter I have at the moment, I don't know what the date is on the almond milk versus the whole milk, I don't know how many string cheese sticks are left after the kids grabbed their snacks for school. I don't know exactly how much salt or pepper or smoked paprika or herbes de provence or curry powder or semi-sweet morsels or baking soda I happen to have on hand.
I don't know the technology to seamlessly track all of this is realistically at hand, but it sure would be nice. I do agree, every smart fridge today either doesn't even try with this or just totally sucks at it.
But hey I guess you just have all that data totally memorized and you're entirely omnicient about everything your household consumes. Sure seems nice.
I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.
Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.
Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.