Samsung's Bespoke update is big step towards a useful AI for your fridge

Sam Rutherford for Engadget. The idea of installing a software update on your fridge already feels kind of weird, let alone one centered around improving its AI capabilities. But that's exactly what's happening to Samsung's line of Bespoke refrigerators this week, and to my surprise this patch is making major strides at providing truly useful machine learning in a modern day icebox.

As a quick recap, Samsung has offered AI-powered features like automatic food recognition and meal planning on its Bespoke refrigerators for a couple years already. However, as I found out after reviewing its flagship model late last year, the company's AI capabilities are still very much a work in progress. Previously, the fridge could recognize around 60 different kinds of fresh foods (like fruits and veggies) alongside another 50 or so packaged goods like yogurt or popcorn. That felt like a decent start, but considering the sheer number of different items you can find at a typical grocery store, it was far from complete. Furthermore, you often had to input additional data like the number of items or when something was first added, which made the idea of AI-assisted grocery tracking more tedious than I'd like. I don't know about you, but I generally don't want to have to type on my fridge and I'm pretty sure the engineers at Samsung agree, which is probably what brought about this major update to its Bespoke refrigerator software.

Sam Rutherford for Engadget The big change is that Samsung is adding support for Google Gemini, which has several important implications. By combining Samsung's existing on-device object recognition with Google's cloud-based models, the total number of identifiable foods is increasing from just over 100 items to more than 2,000. Now this does mean you will need to connect the fridge to Wi-Fi, but considering the number of other smart features it supports like calendar integration and video playback, that's not a big ask.