> How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase?

I could see an interesting use case for something like "Check my calendar and a plan meals for all but one dinners I have free this week. One night, choose a new-to-me recipe, for the others select from my 15 most commonly made dishes. Include at least one but at most 3 pasta dishes. Consider the contents of my pantry, trying to use ingredients I have on hand. Place an order for pickup from my usual grocery store for any ingredients necessary that are not already in the pantry"

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mandevil 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

This has been the dream driving smart refrigerators for literally decades: if you know what food they have, you could sell them ingredient li so they could take their existing theta and digeut and make dish sha. Advertisers have wanted this for a long time. But no one has found a use case that is actually compelling to customers to get them to buy such a refrigerator. This is actually similar to the Alexa: Amazon invested in the project expecting there to be a lot of purchases through it, but mostly it gets used as a timer or to play music and not much purchase volume goes through it.

Maybe people will accept ubiquitous digital surveillance enough that they accept someone else knowing what they have in their pantry and refrigerator, but so far it isn't a thing.

	▲	throwway120385 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Who follows recipes to produce every meal that they eat, anyway? I just look in the fridge, select some vegetables and a protein, and bang that together into something edible using spices or condiments most nights. But I'm not going to outsource that to my fridge because I'm a lot faster at thinking through all of that then my fridge would be. I do it entirely without thinking.

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strange_quark 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems like something that won't ever work because there's like 10 decisions that the computer has to make that it can't possibly know unless it's either a mind reader or has a crazy level of surveillance on your life. How does it know what's in your fridge or pantry and the quantities of each item? How does it know how many people you're cooking for? What if your kids or spouse aren't going to be home a given night -- do they all have their own calendars that are impeccably maintained and synced to yours? What's your budget and do you really trust it spending your money? What if there are several options for each ingredient, how does it know your preference? Perhaps you prefer to buy certain ingredients at Costco and were planning on making a trip tomorrow, how does it know not to order stuff you buy from Costco in your grocery order?

Even if it could figure everything out, is this a problem that people actually have? I'm not even being facetious, but you're describing someone who cares enough to spend time cooking and clearly has a preference on what they want to make, but doesn't care enough to actually select the specific dishes.