With all the laptop, tablet and smartphone releases, it's easy to forget that IFA is also a home appliance trade show. Bosch reminds everyone of this fact and announces its partnership with Drop, a smart kitchen company behind the Bluetooth-enabled kitchen scale.
"We're excited to officially announce that we are partnering with Bosch to truly make the connected kitchen a reality for everyone," says Drop CEO Ben Harris.
With the partnership, Drop can now integrate its kitchen operating system in Bosch appliances that have Home Connect functionalities. Through the integration, Bosch Series 8 ovens with Home Connect can now be controlled remotely using the Drop Recipes app. This means that monitoring the temperature, time and adjusting settings can now be done from within the app.
"Bosch appliances are designed and developed to be surprisingly simple solutions. We feel that the delightful experience that Drop has created is very much in that vein," says Johannes Müller, Bosch Home Appliances' head of global brand communication. He also notes that the addition of Drop's intuitive recipe experience to Bosch's appliance lineup enables the company to push product innovation further and turn cooking into a seamless and stress-free experience.
Note that the Drop Recipes mobile app was originally released to be paired up with the Drop Scale. Once the scale is connected to an iOS device, the user can set an interactive recipe to follow. The app will then intuitively tell the user which ingredients to add, in what order to add them in and when to stop adding. The app is limited to iOS and has no Android port at the moment of writing.
However, the oven is just the start. Harris hints at some possible innovations that Bosch's collaboration with Drop can produce. The CEO mentioned possibilities with an intuitive blender that knows how much of what ingredient needs to be added in order to keep the proper proportions for a smoothie.
He also brought up more ideas about automating oven cooking — having the appliance preheat itself at the right time or have itself turned off when the food is cooked, all according to the dish' recipe. Harris went on further and suggested a filter for recipes, which will bring up possible dishes using only ingredients that the user has.
Aside from its announcement regarding the Drop partnership and the OS integration into its appliances, Bosch also launched several smart home products during its IFA 2016 press conference. The list includes the motion-sensing Bosch 360 Indoor camera, the Bosch Twinguard smoke detector that doubles as an air quality monitoring device and the Bosch Eyes, an outdoor camera with a built-in intercom and motion sensor alarm.
