A refrigerator with a robotic arm inside of it that puts your groceries away for you was not on my bingo card. Yet, at Dreame’s NEXT event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company said that’s one of its next big ideas. I’ll believe it when I see it, of course, but we should still talk about it.
Dreame is calling it the N1 Refrigerator, and it sounds fully unhinged. (Not the two French doors the company showed it with. I’m pretty sure those have hinges.) Watching an animation that the company displayed during its presentation, I was very confused as a digital person placed a full bag of groceries in the middle of the fridge’s bottom shelf. “Well, that’s an insane thing to do,” I thought. Then, a robotic arm and hand I hadn’t noticed before, folded up at the top of the fridge, descended into view and started pulling things out of the bag and putting them away, and my brain cracked a little.
Some of the other features of the N1 include that it can dispense sparkling water, much like the FizzFresh Refrigerator Dreame announced earlier this year and that it said at its event today it plans to release a “Pro” version eventually. It also features mmWave sensing, so it knows when a human is nearby and, based on their body shape, can guess which person in the household it is.
Mind you, the only indication that the N1 is a product the company is actually working on was a series of animated and still renders. Dreame didn’t have an actual floor model of this refrigerator to show those of us at the event.
In a press kit Dreame shared with me, the company says it will feature AI food recognition that will use “dual 8MP bionic cameras and a 32-channel hyperspectral sensor with a wavelength of 900-1700 nanometers” to identify and keep track of the various ingredients in your refrigerator. Dreame says its AI system “can identify up to 1,800 types of ingredients” and touts a 95% recognition accuracy “in ideal unobstructed environments.”
That’s not just so you can ask the N1 what food is in your fridge. During its presentation, Dreame called the fridge “Your Family Health Center” and said it can synchronize with health devices like smartwatches and smartphones. The company says the N1 will feature on-device AI and that using your personal information, the fridge can make recommendations based on your activity. For example, it might suggest drinking water after a workout. It’ll also provide metrics like your heart rate or body fat. One slide hinted at the kinds of things its system can do, like predict your weight change trends.
My own fridge, a Samsung Bespoke model, sports an internet connection, and I can use the SmartThings app to do things like set it to prioritize making ice for me. That’s fine; I’m good with that. I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want my refrigerator to look over what I have in my fridge, consider my health and activity data, and make recommendations to me. It’s not just that AI isn’t always great at identifying food. It’s that I really don’t want my refrigerator predicting my weight trends, and I’d sure rather not face the possibility of my fridge essentially saying to me (probably not using these words), “Hey fatty, you should cool it on the pastrami.”
Maybe that’s just me.
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