Your mom is about to be replaced with a smart oven named June. Imagine being a bachelor (or bachelorette) for the first time and wishing you could still enjoy those meals that your mother hand crafted from her expertise and years of cooking experience. I’ve got great news for you, you have a new mother, she is a smart oven, and her name is June.
June is the first truly intelligent smart ovens, despite a few others existing on the market. She combines a variety of technologies to enable you to cook like those on Top Chef. June has an integrated scale, camera with image recognition, and even a temperature probe. What this allows you to do is simply place your food into the oven, allow the oven to scan your food, and it will adjust to just the right temperature and time to give you the perfect meal.
Note: This is not a sponsored post in any way. We’re just pretty excited about the prospect of perfectly cooked turkey.
It gets better, the oven has built-in algorithms that use all of its inputs combined to cook your food just right. The example in the video explains how using the temperature probe, the oven slowly heats a turkey until its internal temperature reaches the right temperature. It then cranks up the heat to create that perfectly crisp outer layer to compliment your gooey chicken on the inside. (June might be even better than your mom. Don’t worry, we won’t tell her that you thought that.)
Additionally, the system has an app that you can use on your tablet or smartphone. This app not only allows you to do things like adjust the temperature and check on your timer, but you can also use the camera to see how your food is looking. Now we just need it to integrate Apple’s time lapse camera feature and integrate with Twitch and we’ve just invented an entirely new category of online live streaming.
The app also has a ton of recipes that come with step-by-step video instructions to help you get the prep work right. (June can’t do everything you know.)
June is powered by a Nividia Tegra K1 with a 2.3 GHz quad-core processor and 2 gigs of ram. She sports a 5 inch touch screen and a full HD camera for food scanning galore. She is also rather petite coming in at only 11 X 16 inches. June uses six carbon fiber heating elements that are able to heat instantly.
While the oven is impressive, it seems the company hasn’t perfected the smart algorithms behind every food type. THe CEO told the Verge, “Right now we are experts in steak, chicken, white fish, salmon, bacon, cookie dough, brownie mix, toast, bagels, and hamburger buns.” That covers everything that I need, but if you’re hoping for a perfected Crème Brûlée, the company states that they will continue to beef up their database and optimize their algorithms as time goes on. The oven connects to Wi-Fi and updates automatically, so grandma doesn’t have to worry about fiddling with software updates so she can bake those cookies she suddenly became famous for. The only risk you run is they may tweak your favorite recipe to a different definition of perfection. Hopefully, they give you the ability to lock the cooking algorithm in place for your favorite meals. (This is not a confirmed feature.)
June is scheduled to be released in early 2016 and is currently available for pre-order at an early bird rate of $1,495 dollars. If you’re interested, act quick as this deal ends on July 10th. The device will MSRP at $2995 dollars. Take a look at June’s full overview in the video below:
Other Smart Ovens
This is not the first smart oven on the market. Breville currently offers a smart oven at a fraction of the price ($249), and a fraction of the features. The main smart feature of this oven are the 5 smart heating elements and 9 pre-set cooking functions for things like “Toast, Bagel, Bake, Roast, Broil, Pizza, Cookies”, etc… Additionally, the device remembers your preferences so as you tweak the 9 pre-set meal options, it will make those the standard over time. Breville’s oven brings a few cool innovations but lacks the image recognition, integrated app, and overall swagger that June brings to the table. Breville’s oven could be a good interim choice while we wait for June to be released.
Overall, we’re pretty excited about the prospect of June replacing our mothers… ahem… ovens, to make our meals more delicious. Let’s be honest, there are not a lot of things better in life than well cooked food. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Sound off in the comments below.