Android moves into the kitchen with Dacor's Discovery smart oven

Lazy or inexperienced cooks across America long for a future where appliances instinctively know how to make a meal. Well, the future is almost here.Luxury appliance maker Dacor expects to introduces its 30-inch, Android-powered Discovery wall oven this week at the International CES.The company says the smart oven lets you surf the Internet, view recipes, and even enter a guided cooking mode for novice chefs. It was not available for a hands-on at the CES Unveiled event Sunday.You might not know how long to cook that rack of lamb, but if you key its weight into the 7-inch LCD screen, called the Discovery IQ controller, at the top of the oven, the Discovery does the rest of the work by setting the temperature and a timer.  A corresponding app which the company did show the press lets you monitor the cooking process outside the kitchen on a smartphone or tablet.
As is the case with most Internet-connected appliances, the Discovery is a little on the pricy side. A single oven will set you back $4,499, and a double retails for $7,499. It is expected to hit the market this summer at 3,200 specialty retail stores nationwide.The oven should make a public appearance at CES Tuesday.These sources are discussed, with deliberately clumsy pretentiousness, in a sort of symposium that is conducted early in this hourlong show. A microphone is passed among — and thrown and ripped from the hands of — six performers, who talk about the genesis of the show and the personal, historical, sexual and sociological implications of the Frankenstein myth before one speaker descends into polysyllabic gobbledygook that puts a period to any serious discussion. Well, that and the viscera-pink gooey stuff that keeps dropping off the suspended bier, bearing an inhumanly human cargo, which hangs ominously above the panel.
 From then on you can choose to apply or disregard whatever ideas have been bruited in this opening session.50s kitchen, bakeware back in style.Don't look for a clear through line. Words and images, time periods and art forms, collide and go splat via production devices that are as high tech as the latest gadget from the Apple store (camera cellphones play a major role) and as low-tech as Silly Putty, or whatever that gunk is that they manufacture in a mock-TV-cooking class segment.That sequence, by the way, perfectly captures the happy contradictions of Radiohole. Brains, we are being told, are what the troupe is whipping up for consumption, and the pliable, sticky mass that emerges is plopped on all the chefs' heads. Then, as the stuff oozes down over their faces, the image of the actor Eric Dyer (who plays the Creature, sort of, and who never stops talking) is simulcast over theirs. And voilà, an instant battalion of monsters, who might well conquer the world if they just looked a little more confident.