STACK #203 Sep 2021

FEATURE LIFE TECH

Let There Be Light

Kitchen Creations, Taken to the Max S mart speakers have come a long, long way from the days (not that long ago) when the chunky cylinder that was the Google Home became the go-to for questions about anything and control of almost everything. Google were quick to see the advantages of a screen being attached to their speakers, turning them from inert assistants to interactive hubs in the home. And it’s in the kitchen that the latest and best version of what’s now known as the Google Nest Hub – the Max – really shines. Food prep and cooking is often complicated stuff, especially when you’re doing a complex recipe for the first time – and with the Nest Hub Max, you can call up recipes just by asking Google Assistant. You get step-by-step instructions – on screen, not just by voice, so you don’t have to race to keep up. The ingredients and measurements are right there on the big 10-inch HD screen so you can see them clearly, and if you’re uncertain about measurements or cooking times, just ask Google and the info’s right there for you. Of course, the Nest Hub Max also lets you do everything else you’d expect from a Google device – from playing video and displaying photos to monitoring your Nest doorbell and keeping track of your reminders. It even recognises your face, so you get the info that matters to you. As the centre of a smart kitchen, it’s brilliant.

C ooking up a storm in the kitchen is great fun, but in many cases, kitchen lighting leaves a lot to be desired. Usually a task left to plain fluorescent tubes and a lamp in the stove’s range hood, it can make preparing food a bit of a bleak experience. When you’re preparing ingredients, you want to be able to clearly see what you’re doing, and the same goes for plating meals. Extra lights are a really nice thing to have for any kitchen – especially lights under cabinets and over benchtops. But when you’re busy with food prep or deep into a cook, having to stop to use manual light switches can be a pain, especially when your hands have just been handling ingredients. That’s where smart lighting is incredibly handy. Not only can it be almost infinitely customised to suit the exact environment and mood you want in your kitchen, it can be controlled with your voice, using Google Assistant, Apple Homekit or Amazon Alexa. One of the cleverest implementations of

Long Life Smart Lights Aside from the many benefits of smart lighting, these clever pieces of tech are also incredibly power-efficient – making them great for mood lighting as well as practical uses – and also have an incredibly long life, making the days of replacing kitchen bulbs a thing of the past. However, to prolong their life, don’t mount them above hot areas like stovetops and ovens.

smart lighting is the lightstrip – one of those occasions where you can’t help but marvel about how far smart tech has come in such a short time. Quite literally a thin strip containing dozens of embedded, wafer-thin LED lights, a lightstrip can be cut to size to fit exactly under kitchen cabinets (easily attached by the adhesive built into the strip) to provide fully customisable lighting to the benchtop below. Philips’ Hue range of smart lighting has become one of the world’s most popular brands in this space, and their latest colour Bluetooth lightstrip is ideal for transforming kitchen bench spaces. Capable of displaying any temperature of white light and over 16 million colours, the two-metre strip can be extended with a low-cost extension kit up to lengths of 10 metres if necessary – or trimmed down to fit your space, with the cut-off section still fully usable as lighting on another lightstrip base unit via an included connector clip. Of course, there are plenty of drop-in smart light replacements for your existing light fittings (including a huge range of lights from LIFX, Lenovo, Nanoleaf and others) – but being able to completely customise your bench lighting in the kitchen is something that enhances – and illuminates – the space beyond what’s previously been possible.

Out of Sight? Not with the Nest Hub The built-in video camera on the Nest Hub is perfect for video calls – and it’s clever enough to follow you as you move around the room, so you’re always visible to the people you’re chatting to.

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