In what could be another step toward a future in which humans are enslaved to vindictive, super-intelligent robot masters, Nintendo has released a multimodal “interactive cooking coach” for Nintendo DS.
Personal Trainer: Cooking features the electronic “DS Chef,” voice-recognition technology, two hundred forty recipes from around the world, and video cooking demonstrations.
The product can teach aspiring chefs basic cooking techniques and boasts a touch screen interface that allows you to check ingredients on an electronic shopping list that can be carried to the grocery store.
Personal Trainer: Cooking also lets users search recipes based on ingredients, calorie content, or cooking time.
And, if a your hands are “accidentally” scaled with red hot cooking oil and therefore unable to poke at the touch screen, the voice recognition feature allows users to tell the DS Chef–billed as a “friendly electronic cooking instructor”–to move on to the next step or repeat the last instructions.
I don’t know about you, but Sarah Connor and I are hunkering down in our bunker, eating canned beans, and never learning to cook.

Adam B. —
November 24, 2008 @ 1:27 pm