Member-only story
Roast a Chicken With Your Voice
The Amazon Smart Oven is a capable oven for the price
A Wi-Fi-connected, voice-controlled, smart microwave sounds like a bad tech joke from 2004. I can almost picture some cruise ship comedian at the time saying, “A phone in your pocket? What’s next? A microwave that goes on the internet?” to the muffled, polite chuckles of a distracted crowd busy wolfing down buffet prime rib. When I recently learned that such a product actually exists — and that you could get it on Amazon for $249.99 — I knew I absolutely could not live without it.
The Amazon Smart Oven is a combination microwave, food warmer, air fryer, and convection oven with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. The oven connects to your home network, allowing you to control its cooking functions using your voice and Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant. You can use your own Alexa-enabled device (such as an Amazon Echo) or press an “Ask Alexa” button on the oven itself and speak to it directly.
The Smart Oven includes other tech-enabled features to help you cook better, like an insertable probe that measures your food’s internal temperature and an app-based scanner that lets you automatically cook selected items from Whole Foods, Marie Callender’s, and Gardein by scanning their barcodes.
Reviews on Amazon describe the Smart Oven as “quite large” and (more negatively) as “45 pounds of disappointment.” Calling the oven large is an understatement. I only found one adjective adequate to describe its size: ginormous. It’s so big and heavy (50+ pounds in its massive, bulky box) that you technically need two people to lift it safely. I haven’t done a proper deadlift since gyms closed in March, so I welcomed the opportunity to schlep the oven into my home. But if I’d had to go up a flight of stairs, I definitely would have enlisted a helper.
Even out of the box, the Smart Oven is still massive. Ages ago in high school, our student newspaper had a monopoly on selling concessions for our school’s football games. Every Saturday — in a move that a savvy insurance company really should have banned— we were set loose in the cafeteria’s…
