Microsoft Helps Develop Smart, IoT-Enabled Refrigerators (microsoft.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Promising "intelligent food management" to help with shopping and meal planning, Microsoft is collaborating with household appliance manufacturer Liebherr to develop a refrigerator where stored groceries "can be monitored using internal cameras." The refrigerators will use Microsoft's object recognition technology to create a list of your groceries -- with photos -- accessible via an an Android or iOS app (or a Windows device).

"Microsoft is providing computer vision capability as part of this collaboration," says their web page, citing the deep-learning technology underlying the Microsoft Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, released in Microsoft's open source Computational Network Toolkit. "Using the deep learning algorithms contained within CNTK, Microsoft data scientists worked with Liebherr to build a new image processing system to detect specific food products present inside a Liebherr refrigerator..."

Comments

Re: Fucking Useless Shit

[Calydor]

Oh, the sensor broke?

The cooling element gets disabled and the refrigerator needs to be repaired.

Same way you can't scan a black and white paper if your all-in-one printer and scanner is out of cyan ink.

Re:Smart refrigerators

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is one feature that looks handy: the camera. I've often been at the supermarket and thought "hang on, do I need milk/eggs/whatever?" The rest though? Meh. And I'm not cool with paying more that $50 or so extra for the camera either.

You mean .. like Samsung already has??

[johnlcallaway]

Ok .. they don't have image detection. But they do already have a fridge that has a camera to see the inside and a neat Android interface. My wife and I played with one at a local store recently and it was kinda neat. It had a nice whiteboard function to leave notes, supported streaming video and supposedly interfaced with the SmartTVs, although I'm not sure of the functionality. Since it appears to use Android, it was pretty intuitive to us. I don't think it would be to people who haven't used Android phones though.

I don't know how useful image detection will be without several cameras in the back and side of each shelf. But it was interesting to be able to see very clearly what was inside without opening the door. I wonder if the energy cost of the TV screen and computer hardware will outweigh the savings of not opening the door as often or as long.

It wasn't worth to me the extra $2K more a comparable fridge costs. It might be to people with more disposable income than I have.