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SmartShopper: A Real Yo-Yo of a Device

Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, December 12, 2007 at 3:30 PM

A visitor from the future has landed on my refrigerator door. Its name is SmartShopper. It's an electronic shopping list, and catalogs like Sur La Table and The Sharper Image are pushing it this holiday season. And if your idea of fun is getting into a screaming fight with your fridge, I highly recommend you pick one up.

SmartShopper is about the size of a Big Grab of chips and weighs a pound. It's solidly built, takes four AAs, and sticks firmly to our refrigerator. It has a built-in thermal printer. And it's easy to use. Just press the blue "Record" button and say what you want to add to your list. SmartShopper will present you with its three best interpretations of what you said. For example, earlier today I pressed the button and confidently intoned, "Yogurt." SmartShopper replied:

YO-YO
YELLOW CAKE
VEAL

Yellow cake? Now I know where Saddam Hussein actually procured his radioactive material: the Quality Food Center in Seattle.

It only took three tries to convince SmartShopper that I was not building a dirty bomb (or shopping for a yo-yo; how often do you buy a yo-yo?). That's a lot better than my wife, Laurie, did yesterday when I came home and she said, "I do not like the SmartShopper." It had taken SmartShopper six attempts to recognize "eggs."

You can train SmartShopper to better recognize your voice, but it has to be done for each individual item. You can also add items that SmartShopper doesn't have in its database. The interface for doing this is as convenient as teaching a baby to read Tolstoy.

When it's time to print, SmartShopper helpfully sorts your list into categories by supermarket section. Unfortunately, it's often wrong about this, too. I needed fresh ginger root. "Ginger," I told SmartShopper. It filed this in the "spices" section. (I was supposed to ask for "ginger root.")

So, as digital companions go, SmartShopper is more HAL 9000 than Holodeck. Still, like HAL, it offers entertainment value. When I put mackerel on my list, it not only identified it correctly, it gave me this list of guesses:

MACKEREL
NIPPLES
RED BULL

Sounds like a hell of a weekend to me.

SmartShopper: $150 from smartshopperusa.com and other retailers, including Amazon.com

About the author: Matthew Amster-Burton lives in Seattle. His work appears frequently in the Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. He also maintains the blog Roots and Grubs. His favorite food is pad Thai.

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Tags: gadgets, SmartShopper, technology