Amazon is all-in on Alexa, and this week, it revealed a new set of voice-enabled products[1] ranging from a a wall clock to a doodad that goes in your car. The star and symbol for this bold new wave of Alexa devices? The AmazonBasics Microwave[2].
At a glance, it looks identical to every other 700W microwave, but it has some new tricks. By touching the Alexa button on it, you can ping a nearby Echo speaker, which will let you tell the microwave what you want to cook. In demos, Amazon showed how you could ask to cook "one potato," commanding the microwave to heat a potato like only a microwave can.
OK, OK, so asking Alexa to cook a potato doesn’t sound all that profound. Many Twitter users poked fun at[3] the idea, and some publications have suggested it's “unnecessary[4]” or wondered if “we really need[5]” a smart microwave.
Of course, the answer is no. But if Amazon gets it right, a voice-controlled microwave could bring this dated device into the 21st century.
Fixing the Microwave
Regular old microwaves still work as well as they did in the 1970s, when they first became a thing people put in their kitchens. That’s the problem. It's an appliance that's hardly changed in half a century.
Most households own a microwave oven, but sales peaked in the mid-2000s[6] and haven’t grown since. In 2014, Quartz dug into what it saw as the slow death of the microwave oven[7], pinning the lack of growth on a lot of possible culprits, from healthy eating to toaster ovens. But a lack of innovation has also contributed....