Klove Knob, an innovative IoT product by IOK Labs Inc., is here to make cooking smart and safe. Unveiled on Indiegogo, Klove Knob can be made to replace any conventional existing stove knob without a need to install additional hardware.
With a promise to change the way people cook, Klove Knob is the world’s first voice assisted stove knob that helps in making an existing kitchen smart. It is pre-programmed with things that are cooked most often along with the time it takes. The company believes that it is highly intuitive compared to a micro wave oven, where pre-set menu times have to be searched manually. With Klove Knob, one needs to simply speak out what they’d like to cook and the smart device will set the time.
Available in the range of $25 per unit when bought as a pack of six, Klove Knob has several other features than being an intelligent kitchen timer. For instance, it can be used to personalize cooking time for favourite dishes, learn new dishes, among others.
“Cooking is an art, not everyone enjoys cooking. It takes up a lot of time and attention. Hence, we at IOK Labs made a product that knows cooking times and is intuitive to a user’s cooking needs. There is no need to touch / tap / swipe the screen to set a timer”, said Bahubali Shete, the brain behind the product.
Turning cooking into a delightful experience, Klove Knob flaunts an inherent learning ability to continuously calibrate preparation times based on the user’s real time cooking behaviour, which could vary depending on variables such as utensil size or water hardness.
How it works?
The knob pairs up with a smartphone via an app and integrates with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. It lets user simply speak to Alexa / Google Home / Klove App and ask, “What’s cooking”?, and Klove Knob will respond by setting the cooking time automatically based on what is being cooked.
Asha Shete, co-Founder at IOK and an avid cooking aficionado herself, commented, “Cooking is a multi-level, multi-tasking activity with hands and eyes always engaged. It’s not very convenient to swipe a smartphone with messy fingers. And if two or more dishes are being cooked simultaneously, keeping time with a single timer becomes difficult. There is also the challenge of not knowing how long something needs to be cooked. So we built that intelligence into the solution”.
The team is striving to replicate the taste of the dishes user likes to cook with Klove’s machine learning algorithm, with which user can repeat the dish to perfection every single time.
Designed with customer safety and convenience in mind, it has smart geofencing feature and alerts a user if they step away from the kitchen leaving something on the burner. Some of its other features are deep personalization, voice guided recipes, stovetop compatibility, etc.
The company is also working with other partners such as recipe content providers, and kitchen appliance OEMs to deliver their customers a unified and complete cooking experience.
