Command your kitchen

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…or at least the faucets in it, using Delta's VoiceIQ Technology.

Delta VoiceIQ Technology pairs with your connected home device to give you exactly the amount of water you need with features like metered dispensing and custom container commands.

I have to say that being able to tell my kitchen faucet to dispense 137 milliliters of hot water, or whatever, is not high on my list of desires. I'm happy enough with good old-fashioned indoor plumbing, reliable supplies of potable water, and filters to take care of residual issues. But apparently the market-research folks at Delta think that the faucet-buying public is more forward-looking than I am.

They also offer an rather sinister-looking toilet, though apparently VoiceIQ doesn't yet extend to telling it what to do, and in any case its capabilities don't extend to the elaborate amenities of the hi-tech toilets that first puzzled me in Japan several decades ago.

And maybe Delta is looking forward to alliances that will extend their speech-understanding technology to other kitchen appliance and household functions, on-line ordering of supplies, and so on. That field is already pretty crowded but maybe AI faucets are the missing piece?

Anyhow, since I can remember the days when speech technology was scrambling to prove marginal value in niche applications, it's nice to see that it's now been confidently applied to human-plumbing interaction, as if why not?



4 Comments

  1. AntC said,

    November 29, 2019 @ 3:24 pm

    The best use for voice recognition in kitchens/bathrooms, I would think, is ordering supplies. Uh, that's the last of the milk/washing-up liquid/diapers/toilet-roll, Alexa please order more.

    Will it put the internet fridge out of a job? (Whatever became of those?)

    Zits cartoon is currently running a bemusing series on (inadvertent) voice recognition.

  2. D.O. said,

    November 29, 2019 @ 9:19 pm

    Will it put the internet fridge out of a job?

    Maybe not. You can record in some manner your desire to automatically order extra supplies when the amount in you fridge drops below X and then never think about it again. Just enjoy the targeted ads in a freed up time.

  3. Barbara Phillips Long said,

    December 1, 2019 @ 1:32 am

    @AntC:

    Family members have a Google voice recognition system that they use to compile their grocery list. There is still work to be done in that area. They use half-and-half to cream their coffee and tea, and when they add it to the grocery list, Google puts “half” on one line of the list, then another “half” on a new line.

    In addition, there are other strings it gets confused about while showing no confusion with equally long strings. I can’t remember the examples, but they might have been noun strings.

    There does not seem to be a feature that allows the creation of a master list that Google can use for comparison or correction. Nor does there seem to be a way for the human to say “quote half and half end quote” to signal the beginning and end of a string.

  4. Alexander Pruss said,

    December 2, 2019 @ 10:14 am

    It would save a bit of time in preparing some recipes if one could have the faucet measure out the amount of water. Most of the time, the time savings is small as I'd already have a measuring container at hand, but it would be a nice convenience especially since I might need the measuring container to be dry for the next ingredient.
    But it's not enough convenience to justify the price increment and doubtless reduced lifespan of faucet.

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