A California-based lifestyle company has created Smalt (pictured), which is designed to make shaking salt…less strenuous by automating the process of seasoning your food through Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant.
…Users will be able to request that Alexa issues a command to start shaking salt, without the need for any strenuous twisting or grinding.
Here is the article, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
The people who need a machine to shake salt?
Shakers, but not movers?
LOL… nice one
This is just like that juicer Silicon Vally has jumped the shark
The “company” does not appear to exist outside a simple webpage (and Facebook page) describing the Smalt concept. There’s no contact info, no address, no name of any individual involved.
But hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true.
What did Professor Baumol think of Alexa? I think there ought to be a law. A law that prohibits boy wonders from concentrating in one place. If the boy wonders are dispersed, they’d be more likely to spend their time on something more productive than automated salt shakers. What’s next, flying cars and spaceships to Mars. Oh, wait!
Where’s the pepper grinder, then? The machine for shaking the salad dressing?
Why deploy technology toward a manual task that is so easy to perform? There’s nothing more challenging or strenuous out there for these geniuses to consider?
If I were looking for tasks to automate, I’d start with those which are strenuous, dangerous, and generate the most worker’s comp claims.
This is Bubble activity.
Someone obviously thinks consumers are idiots. Or designs products while high.
As an aside, I have been using a Hario Mini Mill to hand grind coffee for the last six months. It is holding up fine. A nice morning ritual. No electricity required.
I have the same grinder and have used it intermittently for over a year.
What is your preferred coffee system? I have being using the Aeropress and the Handpresso at my remote cabin.
PS — I hope you are not the know-it-all leftist Anon, who posted here a lot.
Are you worried that if I’m right about Hario I might be right about Trump?
I use a Melitta style cone.
He is concerned that he may have to give up coffee.
“A California-based lifestyle company”
What was your first clue that someone thought consumers were idiots.
Alexa, stop! No, stop! Confirm stop! No, too much!
Because obviously voice commands via Alexa can readily achieve the speed and accuracy of manual dispensing…
Your comment made me think of Mickey Mouse getting flooded by the marching mop-bucket brigade in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’
I see your smaltz is as big as mine.
This sure sounds like a joke.
Finally the product that will prevent Murray’s IQ based hereditary meritocracy from coming about.
All the elites will Smalt themselves and their kids into iodine deficiency!
This will pair nicely with my Juicero. We may have only gotten 140 characters, but at least now we have shaken salt and pressed juice bags.
Alexa, I need to take a dump.
Please drink a verification can.
Nothing says “complacent” like not being willing to work hard enough to shake your own salt.
I can see a potential use for this for disabled people, so I have no problem with the smalt. But what gets my goat is people who watch moving images on screens. For some inexplicable reason I am horribly offended by people who are too lazy to use their own imaginations.
We had automatic salt and pepper grinders 11 years ago. Turn them to the pouring side and they would start grinding. A disabled person would still have to be able to do that to use this device.