Microsoft and Liebherr to build smart refrigerators

Microsoft, a tech giant joins with Liebherr household appliances to introduce smart refrigerators into the world market known as 'SmartDeviceBox.'

The two companies are in making the world smarter and better to live. The US technology giant, Microsoft and Liebherr collaborated to come up with a smart refrigerator called as 'SmartDeviceBox' which enables the kitchen users to check the groceries inside the fridge any time, any place or any moment through their smartphones and to market it, if necessary.

According to Ms Power User, Microsoft is using computer vision capability for developing SmartDeviceBox. Microsoft Cognitive Services Computer Vision API can annotate new images with a wide variety of generic category labels and object tags. With this technology future Liebherr refrigarators will allow the kitchen users to monitor the stored groceries and other things using internal cameras and object recognition as developed by Microsoft. An app on your smartphones devices which uses SmartDeviceBox voice module that allows the customers to add the groceries which are needed additionally on the shopping list.

Microsoft research team is in continuous research to make this device sense or recognize the items which are generally difficult ones. The image captured for bottles, eggs and some easy items are recognizable. But the other difficult items are under research for recognizing.

Microsoft's Cognitive Services Computer Vision API powers the image-recognition technology, as published on a blog post on Friday

"The Microsoft system can learn to recognize new types of objects - milk cartons, ketchup bottles, pickle jars and much more - from example images," it says. "When a new image from inside a refrigerator is provided to the newly learned model, it can detect the presence of the objects it has seen before during training."

"Although the current system is a prototype, the deep learning technology it uses is already very powerful and rapidly maturing," the announcement says.

 "Liebherr and Microsoft are actively improving these technologies to turn the newest generation of refrigerators into smart appliances that don't just cool your food but interactively help you with your food management." -as per Geek Wire

SmartDeviceBox is a prototype and it needs developments for more applications as required in future.