At CES 2019, Chefling expands partnership with GE Appliances with UltraConnect

By Clayton Moore Published December 14, 2020

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Chefling, the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)-driven sous chef for the smart kitchen, has been evolving and expanding for a while, and now it looks like it might have a permanent home with one of the world’s biggest appliance manufacturers, GE Appliances. At CES, the budding smart kitchen assistant will expand its partnership with the global manufacturer to allow Chefling’s UltraConnect wireless connectivity technology to integrate with GE connected appliances on iOS and Android devices, starting with GE’s Connected Microwave and Oven.

More CES 2019 coverage

It’s not too clear what kind of wireless technology is driving Chefling’s UltraConnect system but it seems to be pretty robust, with the ability to communicate with multiple appliances and voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home simultaneously. The Chefling UltraConnect is meant to act as a hands-free kitchen helper to streamline the cooking experience.

Recommended Videos

The A.I.-driven assistance can also pull off some awfully cool tricks, like extracting information from recipes such as oven temperature and cooking time and automatically coordinating with GE’s connected smart devices.

“We’re one step closer to our vision of a smarter, more effortless cooking experience with this partnership,” said Amar Krishna, co-Founder of Chefling in a release. “Integrating GE Appliances’ connected products into our UltraConnect™ ecosystem will introduce new cooking applications that weren’t possible before.”

In its more basic version, the app can serve up the best recipes that consumers can make based on what they have in the kitchen, while also minimizing trips to the grocery store and using up ingredients while they’re still fresh. Once cooking has begun, users can use the new UltraConnect functions in the Chefling app to adjust temperature, mode, and timing of GE’s growing line of smart home appliances to match the recipe instructions.

“At GE Appliances, we are in continuous pursuit of developing exciting and innovative products that are built to perform in modern kitchens and deliver new value to our customers,” said Shawn Stover, Vice President of SmartHome Solutions for GE. “This is why we are excited to add UltraConnect capabilities to our connected microwave and oven lineup. This is another great example of how partners like Chefling are helping us transform the cooking experience with A.I. and automation.”

GE’s investment in smart home technology has been particularly focused on the kitchen, giving owners new ways to monitor and maintain their home appliances both at home and remotely via the company’s U+ Connect platform that integrates with a wide variety of smart assistants and kitchen services like Amazon’s Dash replenishment service and culinary GPS app Innit.

Contributor

Clayton Moore’s interest in technology is deeply rooted in the work of writers like Warren Ellis, Cory Doctorow and Neal…

Topics

Entertainment

This wild new TV mount moves your screen without you touching it

TVs can already adjust their picture and sound without much help from you. Perlegear now wants the physical screen to adapt to you as well.

Indoors, Interior Design, Lamp

TVs have become incredibly smart over the years. They can automatically tweak picture quality, adjust sound for your room, and recommend what you should watch next. Yet once you bolt one to the wall, there’s one decidedly old-fashioned thing about it: it’s staying exactly where you put it.

Perlegear has an interesting solution at IFA 2026. The company is showing off the AX1 Smart Adaptive Mount, a motorized TV mount that detects where you’re watching from and automatically moves the television to a more comfortable height. It’s an idea that sounds a little excessive until you think about how many different ways we use TVs today. You might be sitting on the couch for a movie, standing up for a workout, playing a motion-controlled game, or have kids watching from the floor. The ideal screen position for one isn’t necessarily great for the others.

Smart Home

iRobot’s new Roomba concept uses a piggybacking sidekick to reach tight spaces

The Roomba Duo pairs a powerful floor washer with a smaller robot built to clean hard-to-reach spots.

iRobot Roomba Duo featured

Robot vacuums have long forced buyers to choose between cleaning power and clearance. Heavy-duty wet-dry models pack enough scrubbing force to tackle stubborn, sticky messes, but their bulky frames often can't squeeze under low furniture. Slim robot vacuums can glide beneath sofas and beds, but they typically lack the muscle to do much more than sweep up light dust. iRobot's new Roomba Duo concept, unveiled at IFA 2026 in Berlin, aims to solve this problem with an unconventional approach that involves deploying two specialized robots to work as a team.

A heavy-duty floor washer with a companion

Branded Content

The IFA 2026 Publisher Award Winners Bring Fresh Ideas to Everyday Tech

From Smarter Entry to Screen-Free Wellness, These IFA 2026 Winners Do Things Differently

IFA 2026 Publisher Awards

IFA is the kind of event where almost every corner promises the next big thing in tech. Some ideas are ambitious, others are surprisingly simple, and a few make you wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. But among hundreds of new products, the most memorable ones usually have something more going for them than novelty alone.

This year’s IFA Publisher Award winners are a good example. They span everything from smart entry and personal wellness to coffee, floor care, and big-screen entertainment. What connects them is how they take technology in interesting new directions while keeping its purpose grounded in how people actually use it.