Use voice recognition to build your grocery list

I was chatting with my buddy Scott when I could hear his wife in the background all excited about something. Scott told me that she got this new gadget. Of course “gadget” was the magic word and I said, “put her on.” “Tell me all about it.” She had just gotten a “SmartShopper Grocery List Organizer.” I couldn’t believe how excited she was, so I knew this thing had to be cool. I ordered one without hesitation.

The SmartShopper is a digital grocery list maker that you use to actually produce your shopping list. The way it works is that you walk up to it or pick it up and press the record button. Then you simply speak the item that you want to add to your list. Say “Honey Nut Cheerios” for example, and it displays it own the LCD screen along with 1 or 2 other possible things that you may have meant to say. You select the one you said or meant to say and it adds it to the list. When you’re ready to go shopping, you hit the print button and it prints out a paper list organized by aisle/area of the store. The SmartShopper has 2,500 items programmed into it including many popular brand items. Of course it doesn’t have everything that any of us would buy. No worries, you can add your own custom items including the voice command to add it to the list. Although there is no keyboard, you can key in your items with an onscreen keyboard that goes from A-Z with numbers at the end. Another neat thing that it does is that you can flag items that you have coupons for. I NEVER REMEMBER coupons EVER! So this might come in handy. You can of course remove items from the list before you print it as well as add/change quantities.

Now you can make your shopping list all week long by just recording it as you think of something you need. At the end of the week or whenever you’re ready to go shopping, just print the list.

I must say that it gave my daughters quite a good laugh as I took it out of the box, put the batteries in and just started trying to use it without reading the instructions (hey, that’s how I roll). I was speaking too closely to the built-in mic and it was guessing most things incorrectly. It was the suggestions that it came up with that were quite entertaining. I would say “Pears” and it would guess “Dog Bowls.” So they were cracking up. You want to be about 6-8 inches away when you talk. You also want to pronounce the words separately. For example, say Fruit Loops instead of FruitLoops. Once I read these handy tips, I was on my way. The SmartShopper also comes with a handy reference guide that lists the 2,500 items that are built-in, two ways. It lists them by category first and then on page 44, it starts to list them alphabetically. If there are things that you’re never going to buy, you can actually remove them from the database. This will of course narrow down the list of items and therefore  make the voice recognition (which is pretty accurate), even more accurate.

You can also use the SmartShopper to remind yourself of errands that you need to run while you’re out. It will list your errands too on the print out as a reminder for you when you’re out shopping. The SmartShopper has a magnetic surface on the back so that it can go right on your fridge (provided your fridge is not stainless steel). There is also a wall mounting option for those that like to keep their fridges clutter free or you can just stick it in a drawer if you don’t need to look at it constantly. The SmartShopper runs on 4 AA batteries (not included). There is no OFF button, it turns itself off after 30 seconds of inactivity. No training is required. The voice recognition works out of the box and therefore would work for any family member. It goes for $199 list, however Amazon sells it for $127.48. It comes with 2 extra rolls of paper.

View the interactive demo here.