If you’re not quite sure which spice your dish needs, there’s now an AI-enabled spice tool. No, we’re not kidding.
CES may well be home to announcements for computers and TVs and sound systems and so on, but it can also be home for the crazy gadgets you didn’t see coming.
Cameras for butterflies and rollable laptop screens, and oh, something you may not need in your kitchen, too: a smart spice dispenser.
In what will likely be the most unusual of the gadgets we’re writing about for CES week, “Spicerr” (with an extra r) is a gadget that takes a set of six cartridges of spices, and then uses an app with artificial intelligence to combine spices to match recipes.
The company talks it up as doing away with cluttered spice racks, without mentioning that many people have cupboards and can easily put a small jar of spices away with little effort. However, Spicer needed four years of research and development to get it to this point, which is a gadget that can blend spices in case you don’t know how.
Spicerr doesn’t have a price as of yet, but we’re already not sure if it’s the sort of gadget we’d want or need in our home, and possibly yours. Blending spices doesn’t necessarily need an app or a specific gadget — you have a recipe and/or experimentation for that — and it seems more like Spicerr is looking for a problem rather than solving anything new. There’s also the option of The Flavour Thesaurus, an excellent book that can help you work out which flavour goes together, handy for concocting recipes in general.
Not everything needs AI, and a spice dispenser could be one of them. Plus, it’s not as if spices are expensive at the best of times: at roughly $2 for a small jar in Australian supermarkets, you could probably buy your entire supermarket’s spice rack before getting to an expected cost of an automated smart spicer.
However, there are people that live for this sort of thing, particularly if they’re already lining up for the kitchen of the future. And if that’s you, the Spicerr is one more gadget you probably didn’t know you needed (and may not).
