Gadgetory

hi I'm Richard Brown first CNET today we're gonna take a look at the haiku lab's haiku so this little guy is actually a grocery list making assistant designed to use with your iPhone currently all the company says it will be expanding to Android soon the idea is that it can make list items on your iPhone app by speaking to the device or if you use the barcode reader now you might ask why you want a standalone device to build a grocery list and the reason haiku lab says is because this device makes it much easier you don't have to pull out your smartphone to swipe find the app open the app etc with this you simply push the button and either speak into it or swipe a product it builds a list you didn't take that list to the store so for example I can speak in the device and say chocolate and what kind a list and chocolate will appear pretty simple I can also use the barcode reader in the same way so if we push the button you get the light and you swipe down the code it pops up on the list automatically now in testing I found that both the voice recognition and the barcode scanning worked pretty well but there's actually a few features in here that make this a little bit more interesting if I swipe a barcode the Haiku doesn't recognize I'll get a tiny little beep that'll let me know it hasn't shown up then the next time I can push the button say the product and it will associate my spoken instruction with that barcode it then loads that information up into the cloud and the Haiku can then reference that so theoretically then for a company like Trader Joe's it doesn't make its UPC codes available you could crowdsource that information and actually it works pretty well now how cool Labs says that anybody can use this from an adult to a five-year-old but you probably wouldn't want a little kid getting his or her hands on this because the company says it's gonna be assigning a shopping service to the app soon which means that you'd be able to make a list purchase from the app directly it hasn't rolled that out yet it's still working on it but heads up because of that forthcoming shopping service as well as some software and firmware updates down the road the company is still calling as beta hardware that's a little bit strange considering that they want you to pay for it so it's gonna cost $79 for you to essentially get pre-release hardware we're used to seeing that kind of model from crowdfunded hardware but not from hardware that's directly available for sale from the vendor overall this definitely seems a little bit gimmicky and I can't see it being that much more convenient pen and paper for basic list making but in terms of the in-app shopping service there's definitely some potential here and I'm really interested to see how that develops I'm rich Brown this is haiku labs haiku