Wake up to clever coffee
INTERNET-CONNECTED MACHINE CAN MAKE YOU A BREW FROM BED
Imagine waking up, groggy and cursing your alarm, and croaking to your smart speaker, “make me an espresso”. Less than a minute later, it would appear in your kitchen, still steaming. That’s the promise of the latest connected appliance in Amazon’s Alexa family; an intelligent coffee machine that will also play the news, tell you about the weather, or stream your favourite songs to jolt you awake in the morning.
It’s not completely hands off, of course – this is not The Jetsons yet – but could it be the start of a smart kitchen revolution?
We plugged it in and hooked it up to find out.
The $349 Lavazza A Modo Mio Voicy is the first connected coffee machine in Australia that’s built to work with Amazon’s smart ecosystem.
Echo users will find familiar controls on its panel of buttons, including quick access to the Alexa voice assistant (in case you don’t want to say her name), volume controls, and a mute button. Naturally, being a coffee machine, it also features two buttons for espresso lengths that manually trigger its operation.
To take your espresso into the internet age, users need to install the Piacere Lavazza app. It will run through the steps to connect the machine to Wi-fi, link your Amazon account, and is smart in its own right.
Users can set up their favourite cup in this app, from temperature to length, and give it a nickname so they can ask for it quickly.
Lavazza’s app will also track how many cups of coffee you make each day and when you’re running low on capsules, and can be used to issue a cup of coffee remotely, too.
Of course, all of the technology doesn’t mean a bottomless cup of coffee is yours without some intervention.
You’ll still need to supply and install the espresso pods, fill up its water tank, and place a cup beneath its spout before going to bed (or face messy consequences).
And there’s one major hiccup for Australian users too: the Amazon integration isn’t as smooth as it should be yet.
This coffee machine successfully connected to our Amazon account but refused to believe it could make coffee.
“Sorry, I don’t know how to respond to that,” it repeatedly replied as we asked it to brew an espresso. After many, many attempts, it even recited a recipe for coffee from the web.
As Lavazza software hasn’t been released as a “skill” in parts of the Amazon ecosystem yet, this coffee machine appears to only work as a speaker in Amazon accounts so far. We could play songs on it, like a cafe, but could not convince it to trigger the coffee-making process by voice commands.
It’s a frustrating oversight for what would otherwise be a useful smart device and hopefully one that can be quickly rectified.
If it can, Lavazza’s “Voicy” could become a useful new arm of the smart home; one that could save tired and time-poor coffee lovers with minimal effort and bring us just a little closer to that Jetsons’ future we were promised.