Bosch’s fancy coffee machine is getting Alexa Plus

At CES this week, Bosch announced the launch of its Personal AI Barista, Powered by Alexa Plus, and teased a new AI-powered cooking feature coming to its connected appliances.

Coming to its Bosch 800 Series fully automatic espresso machines, the upgrade allows Alexa users to talk with the machine via an Echo smart speaker “as naturally as speaking to a local barista — customizing drinks, routines, and preferences through conversation,” according to the company.

The Bosch 800 Series is one of only a couple of countertop coffee makers that work with Alexa voice control. I’ve been testing it and have had some trouble getting Alexa Plus to consistently make a cup of coffee with a voice command.

Before Alexa Plus, asking regular Alexa to make me a coffee based on a routine I set up in the Alexa app mostly worked fine. But since the new assistant arrived, Alexa has been frequently confused.

This is an example of one of the biggest challenges of revamping voice assistants with generative AI. The new versions find it harder to do some of the more straightforward tasks their predecessors excelled at.

On the flip side, they should be able to do a lot more. At one point, it seemed companies hoped the AI would just figure it out on its own, but now they are having to set up individual integrations again, just as they did with the original Alexa.

Bosch says engineering teams at Bosch and Amazon “have worked intensely to fully integrate Alexa Plus” with these new capabilities. The company says that when it launches, you should be able to control every aspect of the espresso machine: “Using natural language, users may now control every aspect of the already-advanced espresso machine to formulate and improve daily coffee routines. The AI assistant leverages its vast knowledge base, along with machine learning, to pass the command to the espresso machine.”

The routine I set up with old Alexa required me to select a specific drink type when I programmed it, limiting me to that type, or I had to set up several routines for each drink I might want to make. With this new Alexa Plus upgrade, it sounds like I should be able to ask it to make any drink from its vast library, and it will know what to do.

That certainly feels more like the experience I expected with Alexa Plus. I’m looking forward to putting this to the test when the integration launches.

Along with AI powers in its coffee machine, Bosch is debuting its Bosch Cook AI at CES. The company says this is “an intelligent new solution that combines agentic artificial intelligence, Bosch’s proprietary appliance technologies, sensors and a unique user experience within the Home Connect app.”

Bosch Cook AI is designed to provide live guidance through the Home Connect app when you’re prepping and cooking to help you prepare more complex meals, such as “cooking multiple steaks to different levels of doneness, simultaneously.” The system can also “intelligently orchestrate multiple Bosch appliances in tandem,” according to the company.

Bosch will be demoing this at CES, and I’ll be on the show floor to check it out.

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