Retail Observer

information will be tremendously helpful to kitchen designers – I can imagine a whole new range of opportunities to personalize kitchen designs based on information that online connections will provide. Appliances until now have been designed for specific kinds of cooking or preserving, and now we're seeing a new breed of appliances enabled by AI that will learn and evolve their capabilities so that they will work for our lifestyles and the changes we make over time. Stover believes this new breed of appliances will work for a family through different lifecycles. For example, a young family needs solutions for warming milk and baby formula in bottles, but soon the children get older and want smoothies in thermoses. It's not baby clothes in the washer and dryer anymore, it's a soccer uniform and muddy jeans. Functions and features added over time can be considered extreme personalization. With training, an oven will be able to tell the difference between a chicken and a turkey, and the washer will know the difference between a pair of jeans and a pair of corduroys. In the very near future, we will see appliances that are easier to use and will take over repetitive tasks and improve performance over time. MACHINE LEARNING IN A NUTSHELL Machine learning (ML) is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Dr. Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford and VP of Google Cloud, is the genius behind computer vision, an ML subset of AI. Her work is about training computers to recognize images by showing them multiple images so that they can accurately predict what they are seeing. In our industry, a practical example of computer vision is appliances being able to recognize fruits and vegetables. Google Cloud's view is the world, and an appliance maker's view is basically the home, according to Stover. This means Google Cloud brings a broader library of data in the form of images to the partnership. Without it, GEA would need to train computers to recognize foods. Appliances that can visually identify foods and take voice commands are changing the rules of the kitchen game, affording us appliances that are easier to use, improve performance and take over repetitive tasks. PERSONAL DATA PRIVACY It's almost impossible to talk about connecting devices online and cloud computing these days without having a conversation about personal data privacy. Stover explained that GEA attained the Gold Level IOT Security Rating from UL (Underwriter Laboratories) and was the first appliance maker to get that prized rating which means that GEA meets critical benchmarks for cybersecurity and consumer data protection. He explained that data privacy is part of GEA's core – not just something they think about when there's a problem – and the brand builds it into its appliances. Appliances are becoming more like smartphones and self-driving cars, in that they are as much about software as they are about physical machines. These new home automation capabilities will augment our own abilities in the kitchen in a very personalized way, which will save us time and enable us to live in our own homes longer. RO Scott Koehler is a luxury kitchen designer based in Pinehurst, North Carolina. His industry experience includes designing and producing more than 500 custom kitchens. Scott is a freelance writer and National Kitchen & Bath (NKBA) speaker on topics including Smart Home Technology, Mobile Apps for Business, Augmented Reality and Appliance Technology. In 2021, Scott founded The Kitchen Design Show on Clubhouse where he interviews top kitchen and bath industry professionals weekly in a live, online drop-in audio format.

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