ArduinoMania

Security makes money. Every day companies hawk their latest privacy and security features, be it on a billboard, an internet ad or a commercial in your favorite show. Like Apple’s “Privacy. That’s iPhone” campaign, browsers like DuckDuckGo using privacy to set itself apart or the targeted Google cybersecurity ads on social media that I probably get because of my job. That’s good for consumer awareness on privacy, but adds new jargon and complexity to purchasing decisions.

This resurgence of privacy-focused ads has a lot to do with the popularity of data laws. That’s not to say advertising privacy is new, it dates back as far as these companies themselves, but regulation made compliance a selling point. The General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act and various other local laws popping up forced companies into prioritizing data privacy at the same time that consumers honed in on it, too.

Whitney Parker Mitchell, CEO and founder of Beacon Digital Marketing, told Engadget that behind the scenes, when the regulations get put in place, compliance folks get hired for buying decisions and privacy and security get a new emphasis. From there, companies make the decision to advertise or not advertise privacy and security compliance based on the target buyer in mind.

“Where you emphasize that and how much information you put forward within your marketing materials really depends on how important that is to that primary buyer,” Mitchell said. Like a cell phone that feels very personal may make security front of mind, but you may value convenience more than anything in a product like your robot vacuum.

Still, privacy and security are dense and complex, making the concepts less-than-ideal for pithy slogans. Oftentimes when marketers try to reduce it to something catchy, the important nuance gets lost or buzzwords blur reality. “The advertising campaigns can make the issue seem more simple or overly simplistic than it actually is,” Aaron Massey, technologist and senior policy analyst for advertising technologies and platforms at the Future of Privacy Forum said.

It's similar to the market for lemons — used cars, not the fruit — Massey told Engadget. It’s easy to make a marketing claim, but it’s very hard for the buyer to confirm that it’s true because they don’t have the specialized skill set to verify it.

So, to go along with the ad campaigns, more consumer-friendly privacy awareness is cropping up on our devices. “Companies are recognizing that privacy policies are not enough to really help consumers understand what is really happening with the data,” Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, DC managing director of the International Association of Privacy Professionals said. That includes efforts like privacy check ups that direct you to update your settings with a pop up at login.

It’s been a net positive for privacy and security. More regulation and consumer education has ultimately driven these ads. Still, there are things you should look out for before taking them at face value. While every ad can’t be a well-rounded and detailed approach to the topic, subjective claims like ‘We’re the most secure’ should raise skepticism. “It's best to look for claims that the company can clearly stand behind,” Zweifel-Keegan told Engadget, and the high-level staffing like chief privacy or security officers to back it up.

Netflix’s push into video games continues, as the company just dropped a dedicated controller app for iOS devices. The app, simply called “Netflix Game Controller,” lets you use your phone or tablet as a gamepad once you pair the device with your TV. This will allow you to play games available through Netflix’s service on the TV, while controlling things from your mobile device.

Though the app is already available for download, further news remains scant. For instance, we don’t know what games it will support or any details surrounding the pairing process. We also don’t know if and when this will be followed up by an Android app. The app’s description just teases that the gamepad functionality is “coming soon to Netflix.”

This isn’t a huge surprise, given the company’s expanding growth as an indie game publisher. Netflix Games has published or hosted nearly 70 titles in the past two years, some of which are accessible via the regular Netflix streaming app with others available on mobile devices and gaming consoles. These aren’t throwaway titles, either, as games like Oxenfree II: Lost Signals released to critical acclaim. Oxenfree developer Night School has gone on to become Netflix’s first in-house studio.

Other titles coming to the Netflix platform in the coming months include indie standouts like Storytellers, Paper Trail and the Monument Valley series. There’s also an Assassin’s Creed game in the works, along with a port of the mobile title LEGO: Legacy Heroes Unboxed. It’s a safe assumption that you should be able to use the recently-launched controller app to play some of these games. Engadget reached out to Netflix to inquire about compatibility and the possibility of an Android release. A company spokesperson said that it isn't making comments at this time. 

Since last year, Netflix has run a Discord bot that helps people find shows and movies to watch together based on what's available in their location. The company is expanding the "Hey, Netflix" bot's capabilities today with a text-based game.

This is the first time Netflix is bringing a game along these lines to Discord. As you might imagine, it ties into something that you'll be able to stream on Netflix soon, an action movie called Heart of Stone that stars Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. The film will land on Netflix this Friday.

In Heart of Stone: Maze of Odds, you'll take on the role of a double agent (similar to Gadot's character in the film). Netflix says you'll need to quickly make decisions in "action-driven situations." Based on some details that Netflix shared in advance, it seems that you'll need to choose between some preset options, much like the interactive TV shows and movies it has released in the past.

Intriguingly, Netflix says Heart of Stone: Maze of Odds will be different each time you play it. The Discord bot randomly chooses scenarios from a bank of situations. Additionally, you'll be able to play it solo or ask friends to join in for multiplayer action. The game includes collectibles for you to pick up along the way too. Lastly, while Discord users around the world can check out the game, it's worth noting that it's only available in English.

Netflix has been making a big push into games in general over the last couple of years. Last month, it released Oxenfree II, the first game from one of its in-house studios. The company also just debuted a game controller app for iPhone and iPad. As such, you'll soon be able to play its games (which are typically included with a Netflix subscription) on compatible TVs as well as phones and tablets.

Apple is testing variants of the M3 chip, according toBloomberg, with the first Macs running the new Apple Silicon potentially arriving as early as October. The high-end laptop chip, the M3 Max, will reportedly have four more high-performance CPU cores and at least two additional graphical cores compared to the M2 Max, which only arrived in January.

The company is reportedly testing new iMacs, 13-inch MacBook Pros, 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs and Mac minis — all running the M3 chip and expected within the next 12 months. Updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips won’t likely arrive until 2024.

The company could move on an aggressive Mac release schedule as its desktop and laptop computer line struggles to regain its sales footing after a pandemic-era boom. Although it launched a 15-inch MacBook Air in June and new models of the MacBook Pro and Mac mini in January, we could see more new Mac hardware this fall. (The company hinted in its earnings call last week that new Macs wouldn’t arrive until after the fiscal fourth quarter, which concludes at the end of September.) Bloomberg reports Apple is indeed planning an October product launch.

The base M3 chip will reportedly use the same configuration as the M2: eight processor cores and up to 10 graphical cores. However, the M3 Pro will start at 12 CPU cores and 18 graphical cores, and test logs suggest the M3 Max will include 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores. Of course, Apple is likely testing multiple variants of core-count options, and we don’t yet know which versions will make it to consumers.

The M3 chip has been long-rumored to shift to TSMC’s upcoming 3-nanometer process for expected performance and efficiency improvements over the 5nm process used in the M2. Apple is also widely expected to use the 3nm process for the A17 chip in the upcoming iPhone 15 series.

GM says it will support vehicle-to-home (V2H) bidirectional charging on all of its electric vehicles with Ultium battery technology by model year 2026. The first vehicles that will support the tech include the 2024 model year Chevrolet Silverado EV RST, GMC Sierra EV Denali Edition 1, Chevrolet Blazer EV, Chevy Equinox EV, Cadillac Lyriq and Cadillac Escalade IQ — the company is set to reveal the latter on August 9th. There's no indication as to when the upcoming Ultium-based Chevy Bolt will support V2H.

Severalautomakers are adopting V2H technology, which enables owners to power their home in a pinch using their EV. It's an option that can come in very useful during a blackout or even to save money by drawing from the EV's battery when electrical grid prices are high. You can still charge your EV by connecting it to your home's power supply, of course.

Last year, GM announced a spin-off business called GM Energy that includes a division focused on home energy management solutions such as V2H. In June, GM Energy revealed some of its residential hardware, which includes systems with V2H support, so it was only a matter of time until GM started enabling the tech on its vehicles.

Owners of Ultium EVs will be able to manage the transfer of energy between their vehicle and home using the GM Energy Cloud software platform. GM says it will reveal more details about when it will start enabling the tech in its vehicles at a later date.

The beta version of Spotify’s AI-enhanced DJ feature is coming to 50 new countries, after soft-launching in the US and Canada back in February. In recent months, it’s rolled out in the UK and Ireland, but now the robotic Wolfman Jack is headed to more countries in Europe, Asia and Africa, in addition to Australia and New Zealand.

There’s a caveat, but it depends on some initial understanding of what this tool actually does. The Spotify DJ is available to premium subscription members and provides algorithmic recommendations of what to listen to, just like any music streaming app. However, these recommendations are accompanied by AI-generated DJ commentary on what you’re listening to. So what’s the rub? The DJ, based on Spotify’s Xavier Jernigan, only speaks English, no matter where you live. This is not a big deal for Australia and New Zealand, but an annoying constraint for listeners in Ghana, Singapore and most other parts of the world. A Spotify spokesperson told Engadget that the company has “no more news to share on new languages at this time.”

Despite the language limitation, it’s still a nifty toolset. It combines OpenAI’s proprietary large language model (LLM) technology, which powers ChatGPT, with Sonantic’s AI voice generation platform. Spotify bought Sonantic last year, largely due to its focus on generating realistic speech. In addition to the AI-enhanced speech, the platform also gives for written information as to why a particular song was chosen.

This tool is available today for Spotify Premium users across the world, but this is a beta, so expect changes and improvements in the short-term and long-term future. Spotify says that it is “continuing to iterate and innovate the experience.”

The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into Adobe’s planned $20 billion purchase of design rival Figma. The EU said it’s concerned about the acquisition diminishing competition for interactive design software and digital asset creation tools.

The EU Commission has until December 14th to make a decision. “With our in-depth investigation we aim to ensure that users continue to have access to a wide pool of digital creative tools to choose from,” European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said in a statement to Reuters. Engadget asked Adobe for comment, but the company didn’t immediately respond. (We’ll update this article if it does.)

The move echoes a similar move from the UK last month when its Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched its own in-depth investigation into the transaction. The UK has until December 27th to complete its “phase two” review.

The transaction would be the largest-ever purchase for Adobe. The San Francisco-based Figma, founded in 2012, quickly grew in popularity and became a go-to tool for vector design and remote collaboration. The company’s products compete directly with Adobe XD and Illustrator. Adobe has previously said it wants to incorporate Creative Cloud suite features into Figma while adding some of Figma’s collaborative capabilities to its core products. It said at the time of the acquisition’s announcement that it was “deeply committed” to keeping Figma independent and said there was “no plan” to change its pricing or remove its free tier.

The UK's Electoral Commission has revealed that some personal information of around 40 million voters was left exposed for over a year. The agency — which regulates party and election finance and elections in the country — said it was the target of a “complex cyberattack.” It first detected suspicious activity on its network in October 2022, but said the intruders first gained access to its systems in August 2021.

The perpetrators found a way onto to the Electoral Commission's servers, which hosted the agency's email and control systems, as well as copies of the electoral registers. Details of donations and loans to registered political parties and non-party campaigners were not affected as those are stored on a separate system. The agency doesn't hold the details of anonymous voters or the addresses of overseas electors registered outside of the UK.

The data that was exposed included the names and addresses of UK residents who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, along with those who are registered as overseas voters. Information provided to the commission through email and web forms was exposed too. 

"We know that this data was accessible, but we have been unable to ascertain whether the attackers read or copied personal data held on our systems," the commission said. The agency confirmed to TechCrunch that the attack could have affected around 40 million voters. According to UK census data, there were 46.6 million parliamentary electoral registrations and 48.8 million local government electoral registrations in December 2021.

The Electoral Commission says it had to adopt several measures before disclosing the hack. It had to lock out the "hostile actors," analyze the possible extent of the breach and put more security measures in place to stop a similar situation from happening in the future.

Data in the electoral registers is limited and much of it is in the public domain already, the agency said. As such, officials don't believe the data by itself represents a major risk to individuals. However, the agency warned, it's possible that the information "could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of behavior or to identify and profile individuals."

The Electoral Commission also noted that there was no impact on UK election security as a result of the attack. "The data accessed does not impact how people register, vote, or participate in democratic processes," it said. "It has no impact on the management of the electoral registers or on the running of elections. The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting. This means it would be very hard to use a cyber-attack to influence the process."

We’ve been wondering what goes on inside the minds of animals since antiquity. Dr. Doolittle’s talent was far from novel when it was first published in 1920; Greco-Roman literature is lousy with speaking animals, writers in Zhanguo-era China routinely ascribed language to certain animal species and they’re also prevalent in Indian, Egyptian, Hebrew and Native American storytelling traditions.

Even today, popular Western culture toys with the idea of talking animals, though often through a lens of technology-empowered speech rather than supernatural force. The dolphins from both Seaquest DSV and Johnny Mnemonic communicated with their bipedal contemporaries through advanced translation devices, as did Dug the dog from Up.

We’ve already got machine-learning systems and natural language processors that can translate human speech into any number of existing languages, and adapting that process to convert animal calls into human-interpretable signals doesn’t seem that big of a stretch. However, it turns out we’ve got more work to do before we can converse with nature.

What is language?

“All living things communicate,” an interdisciplinary team of researchers argued in 2018’s On understanding the nature and evolution of social cognition: a need for the study of communication. “Communication involves an action or characteristic of one individual that influences the behavior, behavioral tendency or physiology of at least one other individual in a fashion typically adaptive to both.”

From microbes, fungi and plants on up the evolutionary ladder, science has yet to find an organism that exists in such extreme isolation as to not have a natural means of communicating with the world around it. But we should be clear that “communication” and “language” are two very different things.

“No other natural communication system is like human language,” argues the Linguistics Society of America. Language allows us to express our inner thoughts and convey information, as well as request or even demand it. “Unlike any other animal communication system, it contains an expression for negation — what is not the case … Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation.”

That’s not to say that pets don’t understand us. “We know that dogs and cats can respond accurately to a wide range of human words when they have prior experience with those words and relevant outcomes,” Dr. Monique Udell, Director of the Human-Animal Interaction Laboratory at Oregon State University, told Engadget. “In many cases these associations are learned through basic conditioning,” Dr. Udell said — like when we yell “dinner” just before setting out bowls of food.

Whether or not our dogs and cats actually understand what “dinner” means outside of the immediate Pavlovian response — remains to be seen. “We know that at least some dogs have been able to learn to respond to over 1,000 human words (labels for objects) with high levels of accuracy,” Dr. Udell said. “Dogs currently hold the record among non-human animal species for being able to match spoken human words to objects or actions reliably,” but it’s “difficult to know for sure to what extent dogs understand the intent behind our words or actions.”

Dr. Udell continued: “This is because when we measure a dog or cat’s understanding of a stimulus, like a word, we typically do so based on their behavior.” You can teach a dog to sit with both English and German commands, but “if a dog responds the same way to the word ‘sit’ in English and in German, it is likely the simplest explanation — with the fewest assumptions — is that they have learned that when they sit in the presence of either word then there is a pleasant consequence.”

Tea Stražičić for Engadget/Silica Magazine

Hush, the computers are speaking

Natural Language Programming (NLP) is the branch of AI that enables computers and algorithmic models to interpret text and speech, including the speaker’s intent, the same way we meatsacks do. It combines computational linguistics, which models the syntax, grammar and structure of a language, and machine-learning models, which “automatically extract, classify, and label elements of text and voice data and then assign a statistical likelihood to each possible meaning of those elements,” according to IBM. NLP underpins the functionality of every digital assistant on the market. Basically any time you’re speaking at a “smart” device, NLP is translating your words into machine-understandable signals and vice versa.

The field of NLP research has undergone a significant evolution in recent years, as its core systems have migrated from older Recurrent and Convoluted Neural Networks towards Google’s Transformer architecture, which greatly increases training efficiency.

Dr. Noah D. Goodman, Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science, and Linguistics at Stanford University, told Engadget that, with RNNs, “you'll have to go time-step by time-step or like word by word through the data and then do the same thing backward.” In contrast, with a transformer, “you basically take the whole string of words and push them through the network at the same time.”

“It really matters to make that training more efficient,” Dr. Goodman continued. “Transformers, they're cool … but by far the biggest thing is that they make it possible to train efficiently and therefore train much bigger models on much more data.”

Talkin’ jive ain’t just for turkeys

While many species’ communication systems have been studied in recent years — most notably cetaceans like whales and dolphins, but also the southern pied babbler, for its song’s potentially syntactic qualities, and vervet monkeys’ communal predator warning system — none have shown the sheer degree of complexity as the call of the avian family Paridae: the chickadees, tits and titmice.

Dr. Jeffrey Lucas, professor in the Biological Sciences department at Purdue University, told Engadget that the Paridae call “is one of the most complicated vocal systems that we know of. At the end of the day, what the [field’s voluminous number of research] papers are showing is that it's god-awfully complicated, and the problem with the papers is that they grossly under-interpret how complicated [the calls] actually are.”

These parids often live in socially complex, heterospecific flocks, mixed groupings that include multiple songbird and woodpecker species. The complexity of the birds’ social system is correlated with an increased diversity in communications systems, Dr. Lucas said. “Part of the reason why that correlation exists is because, if you have a complex social system that's multi-dimensional, then you have to convey a variety of different kinds of information across different contexts. In the bird world, they have to defend their territory, talk about food, integrate into the social system [and resolve] mating issues.”

The chickadee call consist of at least six distinct notes set in an open-ended vocal structure, which is both monumentally rare in non-human communication systems and the reason for the Chickadee’s call complexity. An open-ended vocal system means that “increased recording of chick-a-dee calls will continually reveal calls with distinct note-type compositions,” explained the 2012 study, Linking social complexity and vocal complexity: a parid perspective. “This open-ended nature is one of the main features the chick-a-dee call shares with human language, and one of the main differences between the chick-a-dee call and the finite song repertoires of most songbird species.”

Tea Stražičić for Engadget/Silica Magazine

Dolphins have no need for kings

Training language models isn’t simply a matter of shoving in large amounts of data. When training a model to translate an unknown language into what you’re speaking, you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the the two languages correlate with one another so that the translated text retains the proper intent of the speaker.

“The strongest kind of data that we could have is what's called a parallel corpus,” Dr. Goodman explained, which is basically having a Rosetta Stone for the two tongues. In that case, you’d simply have to map between specific words, symbols and phonemes in each language — figure out what means “river” or “one bushel of wheat” in each and build out from there.

Without that perfect translation artifact, so long as you have large corpuses of data for both languages, “it's still possible to learn a translation between the languages, but it hinges pretty crucially on the idea that the kind of latent conceptual structure,” Dr. Goodman continued, which assumes that both culture’s definitions of “one bushel of wheat” are generally equivalent.

Goodman points to the word pairs ’man and woman’ and ’king and queen’ in English. “The structure, or geometry, of that relationship we expect English, if we were translating into Hungarian, we would also expect those four concepts to stand in a similar relationship,” Dr. Goodman said. “Then effectively the way we'll learn a translation now is by learning to translate in a way that preserves the structure of that conceptual space as much as possible.”

Having a large corpus of data to work with in this situation also enables unsupervised learning techniques to be used to “extract the latent conceptual space,” Dr. Goodman said, though that method is more resource intensive and less efficient. However, if all you have is a large corpus in only one of the languages, you’re generally out of luck.

“For most human languages we assume the [quartet concepts] are kind of, sort of similar, like, maybe they don't have ‘king and queen’ but they definitely have ‘man and woman,’” Dr. Goodman continued. ”But I think for animal communication, we can't assume that dolphins have a concept of ‘king and queen’ or whether they have ‘men and women.’ I don't know, maybe, maybe not.”

And without even that rudimentary conceptual alignment to work from, discerning the context and intent of a animal’s call — much less, deciphering the syntax, grammar and semantics of the underlying communication system — becomes much more difficult. “You're in a much weaker position,” Dr. Goodman said. “If you have the utterances in the world context that they're uttered in, then you might be able to get somewhere.”

Basically, if you can obtain multimodal data that provides context for the recorded animal call — the environmental conditions, time of day or year, the presence of prey or predator species, etc — you can “ground” the language data into the physical environment. From there you can “assume that English grounds into the physical environment in the same way as this weird new language grounds into the physical environment’ and use that as a kind of bridge between the languages.”

Unfortunately, the challenge of translating bird calls into English (or any other human language) is going to fall squarely into the fourth category. This means we’ll need more data and a lot of different types of data as we continue to build our basic understanding of the structures of these calls from the ground up. Some of those efforts are already underway.

The Dolphin Communication Project, for example, employs a combination “mobile video/acoustic system” to capture both the utterances of wild dolphins and their relative position in physical space at that time to give researchers added context to the calls. Biologging tags — animal-borne sensors affixed to hide, hair, or horn that track the locations and conditions of their hosts — continue to shrink in size while growing in both capacity and capability, which should help researchers gather even more data about these communities.

What if birds are just constantly screaming about the heat?

Even if we won’t be able to immediately chat with our furred and feathered neighbors, gaining a better understanding of how they at least talk to each other could prove valuable to conservation efforts. Dr. Lucas points to a recent study he participated in that found environmental changes induced by climate change can radically change how different bird species interact in mixed flocks. “What we showed was that if you look across the disturbance gradients, then everything changes,” Dr. Lucas said. “What they do with space changes, how they interact with other birds changes. Their vocal systems change.”

“The social interactions for birds in winter are extraordinarily important because you know, 10 gram bird — if it doesn't eat in a day, it's dead,” Dr. Lucas continued. “So information about their environment is extraordinarily important. And what those mixed species flocks do is to provide some of that information.”

However that network quickly breaks down as the habitat degrades and in order to survive “they have to really go through fairly extreme changes in behavior and social systems and vocal systems … but that impacts fertility rates, and their ability to feed their kids and that sort of thing.”

Better understanding their calls will help us better understand their levels of stress, which can serve both modern conservation efforts and agricultural ends. “The idea is that we can get an idea about the level of stress in [farm animals], then use that as an index of what's happening in the barn and whether we can maybe even mitigate that using vocalizations,” Dr. Lucas said. “AI probably is going to help us do this.”

“Scientific sources indicate that noise in farm animal environments is a detrimental factor to animal health,” Jan Brouček of the Research Institute for Animal Production Nitra, observed in 2014. “Especially longer lasting sounds can affect the health of animals. Noise directly affects reproductive physiology or energy consumption.” That continuous drone is thought to also indirectly impact other behaviors including habitat use, courtship, mating, reproduction and the care of offspring. 

Conversely, 2021’s research, The effect of music on livestock: cattle, poultry and pigs, has shown that playing music helps to calm livestock and reduce stress during times of intensive production. We can measure that reduction in stress based on what sorts of happy sounds those animals make. Like listening to music in another language, we can get with the vibe, even if we can't understand the lyrics

Typically, smart grills equal pellet grills. While pellet models played a key role in popularizing connected outdoor cooking, there are plenty of other options for controlling and monitoring things from the comforts of your living room. After introducing a smart controller for its ceramic grills in 2018, Kamado Joe released its own connected pellet version in 2020. Earlier this year, the company combined its add-on controller with its popular charcoal-burning red cookers, resulting in the Konnected Joe.

At first glance, the Konnected Joe looks like any other ceramic grill in Kamado Joe’s lineup. However, the bottom half is black where most of the company’s other options are solid red. The display (or Kontrol Board) also sets the Konnected Joe apart, and it’s situated beside three food probe jacks, the power button and a temperature dial. Here, you can see temperature graphs, select a cook mode and receive alerts. The grill will also advise you on how to adjust the vents based on your selected temperature. Buttons on the left allow you to set timers and reconnect to WiFi, in addition to adjusting the display to show grill or food temperatures in large numbers visible from afar.

The Konnected Joe retains a lot of the features that make the company’s ceramic grills great for your deck or patio. The Kontrol Tower top vent, Air Lift hinge and heavy-duty cart all make using the grill easier. Inside, the company’s two-tier Divide & Conquer design allows you to cook different foods at different temperatures by changing the proximity of the stainless steel grates to the fire. You can also set up one side for direct grilling while using a heat deflector for indirect on the other. Most of the components for the grill are semi-circular, which makes the Konnected Joe just as versatile as a regular Kamado Joe. The folding side shelves are modestly sized, but they’re enough to hold a plate, tray or small cutting board.

Kamado Joe’s latest smart grill is compatible with all of the accessories for the Classic Joe grill, except for the charcoal basket. This means you can add a rotisserie (JoeTisserie), pizza stone (DoJoe) and more to expand the capabilities of the Konnected Joe. There’s a ton of options here, ranging from the affordable half-moon reversible griddle ($70) to the pricey JoeTisserie ($300), with some bundles going for even more. You don’t need to purchase anything extra to get started with the Konnected Joe, though. The grill ships with grates, heat deflectors for low-and-slow cooking and all you need for that optional two-tier configuration.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Just under the three food probe jacks is a dedicated button for the Automatic Fire Starter (AFS). WiFi connectivity may get the bulk of the attention on this Kamado Joe, but the AFS is the real star. It’s essentially a heating element at the bottom of the cooking chamber where you load your charcoal and wood chunks. When you turn it on, it runs for 15 minutes to light your charcoal without any additional lighter fluid or fire starters. I’ve used this every time I’ve cooked with the Konnected Joe, even when I’m otherwise running the grill in Classic Cook Mode without the automatic temperature control. It consistently, completely lit up the charcoal. See ya later, charcoal chimney.

In addition to built-in WiFi, another key aspect of smart grilling is a mobile app. The Kamado Joe App allows you to adjust time and temperature without being directly in front of the grill. During my tests, changes were typically quick although there have been a few times I had to input the desired temperature twice to get it to stick. Those temperature graphs from the onboard display are here as well, alongside the ability to browse recipes and monitor food probe temps. However, where Kamado Joe currently lags behind the competition is its library of recipes and how they’re presented.

Right now, there are over 150 recipes available in the Kamado Joe app, organized by food type and cooking method. For comparison, the Traeger app currently houses over 1,000. The Kamado Joe app is also missing a few glaring items, like pulled pork, but the company says it continuously adds new recipes. It also said it’s working to bring recipe videos and step-by-step guidance to the app sometime next year. These are two more items that both Traeger and Weber offer in their apps and they can be a big help when you’re trying a new recipe or are a beginner griller. Still, the app does a solid job with the basics of monitoring and controlling the grill.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Another area the Kamado Joe app could offer guidance is preparing the grill to cook. There are some tips in recipes, like waiting for clean smoke when you add wood chunks before putting any food on, but there aren’t any tips on how much charcoal to add in the first place. This is a lesson I learned the hard way, as the Konnected Joe would consistently overshoot the set temperature during low-and-slow smoking in my initial tests.

After consulting with the company, I determined I was using too much charcoal and the extra fuel was igniting before I needed it during the longer sessions. Using less at the start fixed my problem, but extended cooking times may require you to add more. This means moving your food and any racks to the side to access the bottom of the chamber. It’s not ideal, but it’s hardly a dealbreaker.

None of this means much if the grill can’t produce great-tasting food, and the Konnected Joe does an excellent job in that regard. Since this is mostly a Kamado Joe ceramic grill with some smart-cooking bits added on, its performance is similar to those non-WiFi models. You get the flavor of charcoal, which has a more pronounced smoky essence than pellet grills produce. Sure, you can impart plenty of smoke with wood pellets, but what you get from charcoal is just different. And, at least to me, it’s slightly more intense. You also get the flavor of charcoal through direct cooking for a true grilled essence as opposed to hot-and-fast searing on a pellet grill.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Over the course of testing, I did a mix of high-heat grilling and slow-smoked barbecue. This included a lot of steaks, a Boston Butt for pulled pork, baby back ribs and more. I was consistently impressed by the charcoal smoke flavor present in all of my cooks, especially in the longer sessions for the pork shoulder and ribs. What’s more, the Konnected Joe allows you a bit more room to experiment with types of wood as you add chunks to supplement the charcoal. There are different kinds of pellets intended for different foods, but sometimes those aren’t a single type of wood even if they're labeled as such. For example, Weber’s Cherry pellets are 60 percent Maple. With the Konnected Joe, you can grab a bag of a single type of wood chunks (I use Kingsford) and change them up based on what you’re cooking.

Another thing you need to be aware of (and this applies to ceramic grills in general) is the long cool-down period. Due to the nature of the materials, these models retain heat a lot more efficiently than a kettle or gas grill – or even most pellet options. This is great while you’re cooking, but it also means you need to plan for an extended time for the grill to cool off before you can put the cover on. As an example, I finished cooking ribs around 5PM at a temperature of 275 degrees (a five-hour cook). When I locked up for the night around 11PM, the grill was still warm to the touch, so I couldn’t cover it yet. High-heat searing required even more time to cool off, and in most cases, I had to leave the grill uncovered until the next day.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

One area where the Konnected Joe surpasses WiFi-enabled pellet grills is the ease of cleanup. You only need to use the included ash tool to scrape debris through the holes in the bottom of the cooking chamber, leaving larger pieces of used charcoal for the next cook. A tray inside the bottom vent slides out for easy disposal. If there’s a large amount of ash, you may need to use the tool to scrape that slot, but you shouldn’t need to get out the shop vac like you do for a pellet grill. Of course, the accessories may require a thorough scrubbing after use, but that’s nothing some grill cleaner or soapy water can’t handle.

If you’re looking for a charcoal-burning alternative to the Konnected Joe, you don’t have to go far. Parent company Middleby Outdoor also owns the Masterbuilt brand that has the Gravity Series smart grills we tested in 2020. While the Gravity Series 560 was the first version, the company has since introduced the larger Gravity Series 800 that comes with a griddle insert and the Gravity Series 1050 with the largest cooking capacity of the trio.

The design is the same across all three models: a gravity-fed hopper on the right side funnels charcoal down to a digitally-controlled fan to maintain temperatures. You can add wood chunks to the ash bin to produce more smoke. The Gravity Series is capable of hot-and-fast searing, low-and-slow smoking and everything in between, all with the ability to monitor temperatures from your sofa. One key issue with those grills is they can be difficult to light when you have used charcoal at the bottom of the hopper, so it’s best to cycle through and have fresh fuel to light, mixing any used bits mid-chamber.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

If ease of use is your top priority, a pellet model is worth considering when shopping for a smart grill. In addition to full-featured apps for monitoring and controlling the grill from afar, Traeger and Weber both offer easy-to-follow recipe guidance. Both companies also give you estimated completion times in their apps (via Meater for Traeger) so you have an idea of when to have the sides ready (and to keep hungry guests informed of the situation).

What’s more, pellet grills don’t require you to futz with components to add more fuel as you simply refill the hopper outside of the cooking area if you start to run low. Cleanup is a little more involved, but for longer cooks that don’t require any spritzing to keep the meat moist or wrapping to expedite cooking, this type of grill is truly set it and forget it. Weber’s most recent model is the SmokeFire Sear+, which offers over 1,000 square inches of cooking space for $1,599. The best new Traeger for most people is the recently redesigned Ironwood, the smaller version of which is $1,800.

At $1,699, the Konnected Joe is very expensive for a charcoal grill. However, it’s more affordable than the Classic Joe Series III, which offers the same cooking area without the connectivity and AFS igniter. A comparably sized Big Green Egg is around $1,100, but again, you’ll need a secondary device for any kind of temperature monitoring. When you pit it against WiFi-equipped pellet grills, the Konnected Joe isn’t that far off. In fact, it’s slightly cheaper than Kamado Joe’s own Pellet Joe. A connected grill and all the convenience that it affords has never been cheap, but the Konnected Joe pairs all the versatility of a ceramic cooker with the advantages of charcoal and performs well. If the company can expand and refine its companion app, this grill will be a complete package – even if it commands a steep investment.