One man embarked on an 11-hour quest to make a cup of tea using a WiFi kettle

2 months ago

The year of 2016 is a strange time – Google has an app (Allo) that operates essentially as a third person in your conversation, able to jump in and answer questions and find information when you want, while Amazon has a smart speaker that can control the appliances in your home.

That Amazon speaker – Echo – has just launched and, as a result, brought the idea of the internet of things and the smart home back to the front of people’s minds, again showing that connecting your appliances together and then controlling them with your voice is a cool thing to do.

One man, Twitter user Mark Rittman certainly thought so. He embarked on a plan to get his WiFi kettle connected to his Amazon Echo so that he could boil it simply by asking.

However, his plan soon turned into something of an epic journey, as Mark was forced down something of a coding rabbit hole.

The five hour mark came and went, yet still no tea.

Through the afternoon and into the evening Mark struggled on, until success, the kettle boiled – 11 hours after setting out to do so.

But it took out several other smart home products in the process.

But finally, at just gone midnight and a whole 17 hours after initially starting work on the kettle, Amazon Echo and the kettle were now one.