Lately on yt I have been seeing a shitload of ads for a new oven with AI, it is marketed as knowing what you are cooking in it would make it better.
I don’t see how.
Also, on the product page on the manufacturers web page, the second sentence of the body reads:
Navigating through the extensive settings menu is beautifully simple with the new touch screen user interface.
I am sorry, a fucking settings menu on an oven is a primary sales argument?
What the hell?
There is more shit:
With cookControl Pro, all you have to do is select your dish, choose how you want it done, and let your oven do the rest.
You mean like a normal oven? You set the temp according to the dish?.
They even brags about internal steak and bread thermometers, we have had those for decades.
Well obviously, it has a connection to an app or even a smart speaker, and ofcourse the UI on the oven is a touch UI.
Thanks, but no thanks, I’ll keep using my oven with normal knobs…
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At least with the internal thermometer you could plausibly use some kind of control loop. But all the recipes you get are going to assume a normal fixed-temperature oven anyway.
I think all the “AI” magic beyond that is a con, in the purest sense of the word. They are trying to get people’s money by building unearned confidence with bullshit.
Obviously it doesn’t. Same way a fridge doesn’t need to know what you have in it.
An oven should turn on, hold temperature, and that’s. That’s all it needs. Might be nice if it can also do convection stuff. And super high temperatures for pizza. But it doesn’t need to know if I’m baking bread, destroying evidence, or making pizza bagels.
The AI is a gimmick. It’s probably not actually ai. But I can understand tweaking the timing and temperature of certain dishes for optimal juiciness and texture. Some people will cook eggs on high and they come out bad other than some people cook them on a lower temperature for a longer time. Now imagine that someone did science experiments on a bunch of dishes and just programmed it into a basic chip. I think the biggest part would be having it validated and verified. But calling it AI obviously means you did not do any of that so.
AI bros now use the argument “AKSHUALLY every prediction and heuristic algorithm is also AI so you’ve been using AI all this time”.
Need? No
I thought that title was like a metaphor or proverb. Now I just wish it was.
Ads? On youtube? What is this, 2015?
The touchscreen is cheaper to install than buttons and knobs, and they’re trying to come up with reasons that a cheaper, worse product is actually good and you should thank them for their innovation.
My air fryer (just a small countertop convection oven big enough for a whole chicken and sides) has a meat probe attachment that turns off the device when the internal temp reaches the desired doneness, and that requires telling it what kind of meat you have, but thats all. It doesnt need to know anything else, including whether or not you have sides, that’s what the guide tables in the booklet are for.
I assume this ai thing just does the same thing internally, and probably doesn’t even have ai or advanced logic at all. You plug in the food and it references the guide table itself internally. Saving you exactly zero time because plugging in the food is more work than looking at a reference table.
Someone cooking a whole chicken and sides in a single air fryer at the same time is exactly the type of dumbass I’d expect to be using AI and AI bullshit products. 🤡
Why? Its a small countertop convection oven thats branded as an air fryer. You dont know what you are on about if you think thats anything new or special. Every oven I’ve ever had including when I was a baby was convection, its just been shrunk and rebranded as air fryer. This one has about the same interior space as a large microwave and fits about the same space as my microwave. Its not like one of those shitty plastic things or something.
I use it to avoid using a gas oven. It was $200 when i bought it, and I was careful to make sure it would do what I wanted it for.
https://www.sharkninja.com/ninja-prestige-smart-xl-air-fryer-countertop-oven/DT501.html
Ill bet there is a subscription for all those “features” that bricks it if you dont pay them monthly after buying it for $5k
And as an added bonus, it comes with AI so it can help bomb a childs school in a distant far off land.
Lol. I was not thinking that evil, and yeah probably
I dunno when this Brazilian microwave oven I have was manufactured, but it’s very old by now. While it doesn’t have any “smart” features (let alone “AI”), it does have dedicated buttons for specific dishes (beef, chicken, fish, veggies, rice, etc). Some meals require different patterns of cooking (e.g. full blast for few minutes, followed by low intensity for the remaining time in order for the dish not to end up burnt). The more options of dishes available, the more this functionality becomes part of the sales pitch.
So, it’s far from a novelty, and to be fair, having the oven/microwave/etc to “know” the dish could lead to more precise cooking… But it doesn’t need to ship with a spying operating system with internet connection, ads, telemetry, terms and conditions, software updates and a “you’re absolutely right, I mistook your margherita pizza for a frozen lamb and it ended up burnt. Do you want to learn more about the nutritional benefits of burnt pizzas, the Italian culture of pineapple-covered Bruciato, or do you want to stick a cheese to it using the surely-nontoxic 3M® Scotch SuperGlue? Let me know if you want to proceed with the US$ 2999.99 purchase (half soccer ball equivalent weight of pineapple and a pack of three SuperGlue) from our 1,048,576 partners using your MasterCard ending with 9999 and CVV number 909”.
it’s so they know what to advertise to you
It’s probably not using any AI in any modern sense of the word, it’s just there for marketing purposes. What I’m guessing it really is, is more fancy sensors (temperature sensors in more locations, infrared sensors, moisture sensors), and multiple heating elements and/or fans that can be individually turned on and off, connected to a more complicated PID controller that is adjusted based on the selected dish. So it can do things like detect that the rear is hotter than the front and turn off the rear heating element, or detect if too much moisture is being released and turn down the temperature, but it’s ultimately the same kind of technology as any oven with a temperature knob uses.
I rarely use my oven for anything other than pizza, bread and cookies, so it’s probably not very useful to me, but maybe it’s convenient if you do things like cooking a whole turkey or something?
I don’t have a link but there was a great video about an “AI rice cooker” and then a breakdown of the quite simple fuzzy logic actually inside
Neuro Fuzzy by Zojirushi? That rice cooker is awesome, but predates AI. Here’s an archive link to the product from 20 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20050717012420/http://www.zojirushi.com/ricecookers.html
Rice is the food that needs that shit the absolute least. Rice cookers perfectly solved that problem decades ago with magnets and heat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI
I can see a few uses for a smart oven like that, for lazy cooking by inexperienced chefs.
For example different meats require different cooking temperatures. If the computer knows that it’s cooking beef and that you want it medium rare, then it should be able to calculate from the shape + weight + evolution of outside temperatures when the inside of the beef is at the right temperature. With a normal oven you’d have to guesstimate the time yourself (hard without experience) for when you should start probing the meat with a meat thermometer.
The added value for an experienced chef is probably nil. They know when the meat is ready by look and feel and they might probe it once to confirm that they were right.
I think a lazy person would just toss it in a crock pot before going to bed/work and an inexperienced person would probably want to learn.
Fast food restaurants would probably want them though. But it’s not as easy to make a quick buck in that market as it is in the consumer appliance fad market.
I’ve seen new ones with TVs to stream what’s inside. In some way that is neat, but, really, you really suck at cooking if you can’t learn to manage an oven. It’s better and safer to just learn.
