Ever since the rise of the smart home concept, where different appliances and devices could talk to each other and connect to the internet, people have been interested in the idea of a smart oven.
The idea of having an oven which lets you see how food is progressing on the move uses automatic oven cleaning systems to keep the cooking surface clean, hygienic and safe, as well as allowing for automatic adjustments and more settings than many traditional ovens do out of the box is tempting.
However, certain functions cannot be activated remotely. Specifically, an oven cannot be turned on remotely, nor can other high-temperature functions be started without your input.
The reason why this is the case can be best illustrated with the unfortunate case of one of the earliest examples of a smart oven and a labour-saving feature that went wrong.
The June is a small, microwave-sized countertop oven that markets itself as combining seven appliances together and combining them with a touch screen, app, complex sensors and a camera with machine learning capabilities to, they claim at least, make cooking easier and more convenient.
However, in early 2019, reports started emerging of ovens turning themselves on via the accompanying smartphone app, mostly shared by the official owners’ page on Facebook.
June blamed these on user error initially, claiming that the users accidentally tapped the pre-heat button or an accompanying smart speaker accidentally gave the order to turn it on, but the potential concerning implications started to alarm people.
Unattended ovens are one of the leading causes of house fires, and having the capability to do that with a tap of the app only accentuates that danger.
As well as this, with people increasingly aware of the cybersecurity risks of smart devices after Amazon’s Ring range of smart security devices was hacked, people realised that if someone had the potential to take control of the oven and turn it on automatically, risking lives in the process.
Ultimately, June added a feature to turn off remote preheat, and most smart ovens that have been created since allow a user to turn their oven off and alter the temperature, but never turn it on.