[sethhochberg]

I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active" way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or when gardening.

An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...

[emj]

How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing larger portions.

[chankstein38]

Some people might just not want to take the time to math it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the world has the same brain as you.

[emj]

I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to brag.

I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.

[pavel_lishin]

I have no idea how many cups are in a pint. I have no idea how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or how many tablespoons are in a cup, or frankly any of the other byzantine imperial measures.

The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10 on that, not $20.

[lotsoweiners]

I probably ask Alexa how many oz in cup or how many cups/oz in a gallon once a month but have yet to commit it to memory. I have no need to memorize this stuff when I have the internet available.

[snapcaster]

You answered your own question in the comment? If you require two instances to memorize it that means you needed unit conversion twice in cooking

[crazygringo]

Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both between imperial units and between imperial and metric, not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them all but getting them exactly perfectly right every single time.

You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked goods go straight in the trash.

[emj]

I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.

Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see myself doing with a voice assistant.

[crazygringo]

> I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me.

What do you mean it has never worked? What do you ask your assistant, and what does it respond?

> Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.

What's hard? I don't understand. If you need a quantity in unit x, but you only have a measuring cup or spoon in unit y, then you ask for the conversion and then you measure out that amount in unit y.

I genuinely don't understand the difficulties you seem to be encountering.

> do you really do you guys really do it that often?

Yes, literally all the time.

[pavel_lishin]

If I have a measuring cup that maxes at at one cup, and I need to add a pint of something to a pot on the stove, being able to say "Hey Jibble, how many cups are in a pint" and getting an answer would be pretty nifty.

As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart hanging on the fridge.

[mschuster91]

Everyone who routinely tries to cook American or British recipes, for example. It's all "tablespoons", "cups", "ounces", "fluid ounces" (whoever thought about naming that one deserves a special place in hell...) and whatnot.

And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become needlessly more complex as well.

[tomn]

> American or British recipes

American or old British recipes; ours are all metric now.

The exception is perhaps teaspoons/tablespoons, but those are trivial metric values (5ml and 15ml), so easy enough to scale and convert if you don't have the right measuring spoon handy.

[emj]

That is probably it, never would have occurred to me. When doing international recipes doing a translation/conversion is not always straight forward. I cook a lot and often it becomes a investigation into the ingredients and what to replace rather than a simple conversion of units. Not something Alexa does.

[rudasn]

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[9dev]

It's a real problem for all countries not using the metric system, so, uhhh... the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. If the units have no meaningful way of conversation, like gallons, ounces, pounds, cups, and so on, cooking can get hard.