Smart Grills Are Here, Just In Time For Summer
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You wouldn’t know it by the 50-degree rainy days taunting the Northeast right now, but apparently it’s barbecue season (unless you’ve been bitten by a tick). Short of controlling the weather, one of the ways we can prepare for barbecue season is by practicing our outdoor cooking techniques, making sure we avoid accidentally sticking our food to the grill or overcooking it. Or, for those of us who don’t fancy sweating over flames and coal, we can use a Smart Grill.
I’m actually kind of surprised that it took this long for grills to enter the world of smart appliances, though I guess a grill harbors a little more activity than a refrigerator (unless we’re counting hacking). The gas-powered Lynx Smart Grill will cook your food just as you tell it to; it can also remember how you cooked a particular food last time and repeat the process. It is voice-activated, can ignite and adjust its temperature via a wiring system, and comes pre-programmed with recipes. It will also notify users via an app when the food is ready.
Upon activation, the Smart Grill will ask a few questions about what’s on the menu. That’s right — the grill will actually ask what’s about to be cooked, and then it will connected to an online database to figure out how long the food should be cooked, and how. The grill will recommend where to put the food and when to turn it, if necessary, and then follow up with audio, visual, and/or text notifications. And if you get drunk and forget about the grill, it’s smart enough to turn itself off after 30 minutes of silence.
Right now Lynx has developed a Smart Grill prototype, which was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. It hopes to produce a version for retail in 2015. They’re thus far dodging the question of cost — “we expect the technology will cost a slight premium but our objective is to keep the price per unit of the production version well within the window of affordability for our customers.” But hey, perfectly grilled food is priceless, right?
