So, the microwave ovens. I didn't really study how people use them, but here's what drives me mad sometimes. * When I want to make a hot glass of chocolate, I have to guess time and power settings to make it the right temperature. If time is not enough, it will be not hot enough. But if you set a little more time than needed, the chocolate goes wild. Usually I have to heat it in small increments, checking temperature manually every time. After some experience, it's possible to learn what proper settings are; but if the next glass has different size or initial temperature, you can easily make that big mistake again. Many times had I found myself washing ovens inside, -- as a punishment for my love for hot chocolate. * The other popular task for an oven is to defrost stuff. Still usually it's hard to guess these damn settings. Smart ovens ask for the weight of your food, but what if you don't know it? * Some ovens have lots of additional features allowing them to cook food. And often there's a recipe book. There, a hungry man has to seek for the right page with a sacred knowledge: the exact sequence of button clicks and wheel rotations, a magical spell, that should lead to an edible dish (hopefully). Honestly, I gave up most of the times. So, how this could work? *** An oven could have a weighing-machine and a remote thermometer built in. Also, it might have a barcode-reader. There are three buttons: heat, defrost, cook. When I press "heat", it asks what temperature I need, -- and does the rest itself. When I press "defrost", it can monitor what happens inside and stop when ready. If I want to prepare a pizza from supermarket, I just press "cook" and let the oven scan the barcode from the package; then it will know what to do. Now, this might not work, because the oven can measure only surface temperature, and it needs to know the type of food to heat and defrost properly. So here's another idea. *** There's a huge touchscreen. On the top, it displays a search bar. When I start typing something, e.g. "chicken", a smart search starts showing me available tasks: defrost chicken, roast chicken, etc. etc. Additional data, like temperature, can be the part of search result -- or it can be requested later. The oven remembers all tasks I gave it, and shows them on the screen below the search bar. So I will have quick shortcuts for all usual tasks. *** But what if I have a mixed dish? A chicken with mashed potatoes? Probably you even can't heat it properly with a microwave. Here's also the biggest fear for "smart" interfaces: they can't provide an option for every task, and you don't get manual settings to try a workaround. It's called… wait… got it! -- it's called a "hubristic interface". That's a term from a great article on Wolfram Alfa, here: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ru/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html "The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable." Basically it comes down to a mental model that we build for people. The model of "artificial intelligence" is great as long as it produces results users actually want. When it fails, users have to search for workarounds, testing the stupid machine and creating a new mental model, closer to actual algorithms. If it's going to happen, it's wiser to abandon AI, giving users good control tools instead. But maybe it's already possible to create a decent AI for microwave oven in 2013? So it should let me type (or say): heat a chicken with mashed potatoes -- and figure out what's the best way to do it. *** There's also another option. Microwave oven is a tool built around technology, not around human tasks. What would a goal-oriented cooking machine look like? What do you think? //////////// Love it. So let's assume the typing in stuff is a total pain. It works, usually, but it's just not pleasant to do. Meaning people want to do the non-typing in a search box version. Well, I think there's still a lot here. Let's walk through it: Weight and temperature is a great start. You can get a lot from that. What about explaining the temperature you're looking for? Cup of water with tea can be set to "warm", "hot", "piping hot", and "boiling", for example. Thanks for sharing the hubristic thing. I call it "Guessware". I hate Guessware. It assumes it'll be right and doesn't admit that sometimes it won't be. So let's figure out how to make this oven good without being a jerk. Principle number one: guessing is ok, as long as overriding is painless. So you put something in the oven, slap the door closed, and furrow your brow as you try to figure out what to do next. How nice if it were to load a thing that says "cup with liquid". And if it's wrong, or if there's some reason to override, awesome. There's a "manual" button. Maybe it's a toggle because people want to live in manual mode all the time. So it sees my tea, and it got it right. Neat! So now it can give me options right there, like: warm: 25 seconds hot: 50 seconds piping hot: 1 minute boiling: 1 minute 30 seconds [manual] And that manual button is the way I put in some other time, I guess. Now let's talk about learning. A camera can determine what cup I'm using. It can determine that I manually selected 45 seconds, so next time I put this cup in there, maybe 45 seconds is the new way to show hot. Maybe it just affects this cup. Maybe all cups that are similar. Something like that. There are more details there, but now let's return to the search box problem. How do we make it so good that people actually want to use it? Well, it should obviously remember things I've searched for in the past, and obviously take pictures so it can see it in the future. That's clear. But if it's on the internet, all kinds of things open up. Not only can I crowd source stuff, so I can type "Whole Foods Pot Pie" and get the best time automatically (YESSSS) but I can also log into an app or website to see my history, tweak it, whatever. On one hand, this is super geeky. On the other hand, if it was truly simple and truly useful, people would spend the 5 minutes to queue up some common things to save them time when using the microwave. If you have images and history, that starts opening up trend tracking. Not everyone would want that … but some would! // Wow, great stuff! Let's continue thinking. I'm not sure there's a single model of microwave for everyone. I see at least two main groups of users: - One would like to use an oven as a magic box that can heat and cook food. No manual settings, no control, just do everything for me. - The second will rather see an oven as a powerful cooking tool. They'd like to tune things for better cooking. Is it possible to make a solution that would please everyone? I think, yes. We need two things: - built-in cooking programs + a barcode reader. - cooking program builder/editor. What it a cooking program? It's a sequence of operations. Each operation uses certain parameters, like heating type, heating power, ventilation…, -- and it lasts for a certain period. So a typical cooking program for a pizza would look like that (improvisation!): - microwaves 400W for 5min (defrost) - top grill + bottom grill 100% + ventilation for 2min (oven heating) - top grill 60% for 5 min (baking) Now, if I'm not a cooking person, I'd just use a ready program. - I can scan it from a pizza box - I can use a built-in program called "frozen pizza" - I can use an app to select my pizza and display a barcode, and then scan it. After that, I'll get my pizza ready and will be happy. But for someone who loves cooking, it's just a start :) The program is displayed on the oven's touchscreen. It can look like a video track in a movie editor, -- several horizontal bars one after another. Each bar corresponds to an operation. Now, I can change the program if I want to. I can move the operation dividers left or right to change the time when one operation changes other. I can scroll up and down inside a bar, to make the operation more or less powerful. I can add and delete operations. When I'm ready, I can start cooking. The oven displays a moving vertical bar to show what't happening now. If I feel something is not right, I can fix the program on the fly. The oven lets me save a new program in some way. I can scan it back and share with a cooking community on my favorite site. It's also a place where I can get a program almost for every recipe that's suitable for the oven. It could be fun! :) //-------------- Interesting. You guys use microwaves for a much wider variety of uses than I do. For me, I always keep it on the highest temperature and usually stick to the 1 minute and 2 minute buttons. I have never had luck with defrosting so I just defrost on the counter or in the fridge. I have also never used the microwave for "cooking" though I imagine it'd be possible. What I would like to see is an automatic stove or oven. /// To hit both types of users, it'd need to be a dumb machine that's able to hook up to a smart device. I like the aspect of it guessing the food that's inside and giving you some simple options. Barcodes are only a small portion of what you'd be cooking, so it'd have to be smarter then that. Outside of that, have it be wifi or bluetooth connectable so you could create/load these "programs". Crowdsource some good actions that you can use. I think the two types of people that'd use *this* device is people who don't want to think, and then people who want to tinker with things. // BTW http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/161200-raspberry-picrowave-using-a-raspberry-pi-to-cook-a-raspberry-pie