Some Ideas for Timers

“Minute and half, dropping scallops.” For those getting hooked on Hell’s Kitchen, it seems like it never ends. Every dinner service involves Gordon Ramsay having a stroke over items not arriving at the pass at the same time. In a few seasons, I’ve seen chefs get smarter and start to clip timers to their jackets. I’m not sure if this is frowned upon or if Ramsay wouldn’t chew out contestants for not having a natural talent for discerning time without a timer (like he does for those measuring doneness with a thermometer).

In the home, voice-based timers are the perfect utility. We saw this with the Ubi. “OK Ubi, remind me in 5 minutes about the pasta.” What I still appreciate is that our reminders were synced with Google Calendar so if you went out, your phone would alert you as well. It was a low tech solution to having a ubiquitous alert system.

With the Echo and Alexa (and Google Assistant), timers are still an amazing. When cooking multiple items, they are great…

One of the things I appreciate even more with the Echo Show is that I can see the timers listed to confirm that they are indeed keeping track.

So how could this get better?

• Timers to get the kids ready for bed
• Timers to the end of TV time or Fortnite time. (let Alexa be the bad guy)
• Graphics similar to the Pampered Chef above for cooking timers.
• The ability to add a timer manually from a screen or app
• Setting the output on a different Alexa enabled device
• Starting a stopwatch versus a timer (native rather than Skill based)