Hello Egg puts a friendly voice-powered cooking assistant in your kitchen

Alexa is going to at least own the living room, and there’s a good bet that it’s going to own the whole home. But that’s not stopping RnD64, a small company building a small little black voice-powered black egg, from trying to get in the kitchen first.

Hello Egg works as a cooking assistant, with a few extra flourishes — like a friendly little eye to keep you company on a small reflective screen. That screen will show you techniques and videos as well as the typical recipe instructions over voice. After all, you’ll probably want to know how to properly cut open an avocado before swinging your knife straight into it.

We also, however, saw at least a million voice-powered devices (most of them powered by Alexa) at CES this year. So this may just be yet another flash in the pan from CES 2017 this year. And all of this you could probably do on your phone, flipping through different parts of a recipe and videos (though you might be doing it with raw chicken on your hands). But, anyway! Back to the egg.

The idea is that while the Echo is good at going through recipes along with a lot of other things, Hello Egg can nail down the kitchen with a bunch of specific use cases and features. The Echo, for now, is centered around voice, while RnD64 thinks you’ll need some visual elements to walk through recipes.

It’ll come with a lot of other things you’d expect from a voice-powered device, like music streaming and helping manage what’s going on with your pantry. The Echo’s capabilities continue to expand, so Hello Egg is going to of course show that it’s differentiated enough to be the main device in your kitchen — and, maybe with a screen that reflects on to the surface, it just might be different enough.