With some smart home devices, it’s easy to see the utility right away. Smart lights that you can turn on, change the color and the brightness with the power of your voice are instantly appealing. But why would you need your coffee machine to need a WiFi connection?
Caffeine fiends may be surprised to learn there are plenty of appealing smart features that come with the best smart coffee makers. Here are five genius smart coffee maker features to look out for.
5 genius smart coffee maker features
Tailoring coffee to your taste
With a traditional ‘dumb’ coffee machine, there’s not much you can do to customize each cup as it comes. Yes, you can choose the beans and the quantity to include, but beyond that you’re at the mercy of the machine’s limited pre-sets.
One of the perks of a smart coffee machine is the flexibility they offer. Bosch’s smart coffee machines, for example, let you control the temperature, size, strength and bean intensity via the Home Connect app.
Once you find a brew you like, you can favorite it so it’s always ready to go. And it’s not just about flavor: the app will let you know when it’s time for descaling too, ensuring things keep firing on all cylinders.
Never run out of supplies
There’s nothing worse than walking bleary-eyed to the coffee maker needing your caffeine fix, only to find someone else finished off the coffee.
But with plenty of smart coffee makers, that can’t happen. Take Keurig’s smart brewers, for example. The pod-based coffee machine tracks your usage and can be set to automatically reorder when you run low.
Better yet, the deliveries match your brewing habits to be personalized for exactly what you need. The pods have built-in instructions read by the machine, to ensure each cup is brewed to perfection.
Make your coffee remotely or to your schedule
With a traditional coffee maker, you need to be in the same room to get things started and then hang around while your cup is brewed.
But because smart coffee makers connect to WiFi, you can technically start the process from anywhere in the world. Yes, that would be silly if you’re hundreds of miles away, but surprisingly handy if you’re upstairs and know you’ll want a coffee in ten minutes.
Better still, you can generally schedule cups in advance, so if you know you always want a brew when you wake up at 7:30, you can make that happen. Just remember to put a cup in place ahead of time, and you’re good to go.
Buttons begone!
As well as being able to get a drink customized to your tastes via an app, most smart coffee machines offer some kind of integration with Google Assistant and/or Amazon’s Alexa smart assistants.
That means you can make your coffee without messing around with buttons. Just tell your coffee maker what you want with your voice, and the machine should do the rest. It’s a futuristic feeling feature that somehow never gets old.
A machine you don’t need to top up?
In the near future, smart coffee makers could get smarter still.
Take the Kara Pod, for instance. Unveiled at CES 2024, rather than requiring you to refill the water reservoir, the upcoming coffee machine and water filter aims to pull in moisture from the air, ensuring that it’s never empty.
The company claims it can pull up to 3.2 liters of water from the air every day, which should satisfy all but the thirstiest coffee drinkers out there — assuming it lives up to its promise. While it’s up for pre-order now, we’d recommend holding off for some reviews, first to ensure it delivers.
