Why it matters to you
Anova has been impressing us with its sous vide capabilities for some time, but now, it’s finally adding a necessary kitchen function — voice control.
If you have an Anova sous vide machine in your kitchen, chances are you’re running a pretty high-tech culinary enterprise at home. And if that’s the case, you may well want to be interested in controlling your fancy precision cooker with your voice. Luckily, Anova’s new Alexa integration will allow you to do just that.
For the last couple months, a reddit user named David Zielezna has been experimenting with his Anova Precision Cooker and Amazon Echo Dot. After posting about the development of his very own Alexa skill for the sous vide device on reddit, he received “a lot of fantastic feedback from the /r/sousvide community,” and soon thereafter, was asked to help develop the official Alexa skill.
Anova says that it plans to release the official integration sometime soon, and you ought to be able to do quite a lot with it.
More: Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi review
For example, the Alexa skill for Anova will allow you to exercise general control over your sous vide cooker, which is to say, you’ll be able to raise and lower the temperature of your water bath (the key to sous vide cooking), check the status of a meal in progress, see how much time is left on the timer, stop the cooking process, and more, all with your voice.
You can also run an ice bath, which is pretty perfect for folks with busy day jobs. As Zielezna explained in his blog post, “In the morning you could start an ice bath, put your food in the ice bath and leave for work. At 2 p.m. you could start a 4-hour cook to be finished by the time you get home at 6 p.m.”
The Anova skill for Alexa will also allow you to search for recipes and quickly find temperatures and times for various ingredients. And if that’s still not enough for you, the Anova team promises more exciting features upon its integration’s release.
Should you be a Google Home user rather than an Alexa patron, never fear — Anova says the same functionality will soon be added to the competitor device.