This will advise you about alcohol

As summer approaches, many beer gardens will open throughout Japan and the party season will come. However, if you take alcohol too much, of course, it will hurt your health. Therefore, product design and development company STUFF and Toshiba-Memory have developed a learning type IoT alcohol gadget TISPY2 with open innovation.

This is a combination of an alcohol sensor and an SD memory card to measure the alcohol concentration in your breath when drinking and advise you on how to drink alcohol. It also records your drinking data and works with your smartphone via Toshiba-Memory's WiFi-equipped SD memory card FlashAir, allowing you to check your drinking data yourself from a web apprication. The more you use this, the more this learn about you from your drinking data, and give you personalized advice: "You're drinking fast today" "Would you like to drink water soon?" This also has a guest mode, which measures the concentration of alcohol contained in the guest user's exhalation on the spot and displays general advice(It can't be used personalized to the guest).

It supports Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, and you can link it with your smartphone to change the language setting. The power supply is two AAA batteries and also supports rechargeable batteries. The body color is black, and the color variations of the part that measures exhalation are pink gold and silver. The size is 70x70x18mm, the weight is about 100g, and the communication is IEEE802.11b/g/n (Wi-Fi). They have raised development funds with makuake, a crowd-funding platform, and have already raised about three times the target amount. You can reserve this from 13,500yen(tax included). The shipping is scheduled for August.
Project page is here.

Hearing aid with 3D sensor and AI

A hearing aid is a gadget that supports the hearing of the ear. However, Starkey's smart hearing aid Livio AI offers more features than traditional hearing aids.

It has AI-controlled hearing aids and works to reduce the noise if your surroundings are loud. It also has a health tracking function that measures your body and brain health in your daily life. Because the deafness is one of the cognitive functions, it works closely with the brain. In addition, it has a fall detection notification function, so it can be used as a watching gadget for elderly families. If you are interested in international exchange, the real-time voice translation function that support 27 languages this will help. The price is very expensive at 630,000 yen(The hearing aid itself is tax exempt). However, it also has many features like headphones, such as wireless streaming of phones, music and media, etc., and is very versatile.
The target users are mild to severe deaf people, and the warranty period is 3 years.

via https://www.starkeyjp.com/blog/2019/05/livio-announcement

AI designs photobooks

The reaction to sharing photos on social networking services is now reviving physical photobooks in Japan, and there are many photobook production services linked with mobile photo applications. But we're selfish, so we feel troublesome to select photos and photobook layout design. So cheetahs, a group company of leading photo supplies company Kitamura, has released a new mobile application sarah.AI, which AI does.

They originally offered the photobook service sarah, and they added an AI to it to automate photobook production. The main functions of this are the best shot function, the automatic grouping function, and the collection function. The best shot function performs layout adjustment by face recognition and quality determination to remove blurring and duplication by scoring. The automatic grouping function groups photos from date and location information and automatically generates a title for each story and event(Of course, you can also give yourself titles). And, with the collection function, you can edit photobooks without having to select photos individually. All they can be done with the application only, but you don't need external communication, so you can protect your privacy. In addition, it has automatic layout function and various designed covers, so you can make a 140 x 140mm 24-page photobook simply by selecting them. You can make one photobook free each month, but you can add pages by paying 25yen for every two pages(Up to 96 pages).
They have only released an Android version, but an iOS version will also be released in June.

Hands dedicated to potato chips

You might think of this as a silly gadget, but it certainly seems useful. Toy maker Takara Tomy-Arts is collaborating with confectionery maker Calbee to release Smart Potato Chips hand on June 29.

This is the dedicated device that allows them to eat Calbee's potato chips without getting their hands dirty. This is an item that modernized the potato chip magic hand Potechi-no-Te(ポテチの手) released in 2010. Potechi-no-Te gained popularity that it was possible to eat potato chips without getting its hands dirty and became a huge hit item selling over 300,000 at that time. This renewal is based on the background that the number of people eating snacks with chopsticks is increasing so as not to dirty the screen of smartphones with the spread of smartphones. They have added the function of a touch pen for smartphones to the magic hand. You can grab potato chips with a magic hand, eat it, and operate your smartphone with the touch pen on the other side.

In addition, in collaboration with Calbee, coloring and logo based on package design of 4 kinds of popular potato chips flavor are adopted. The size of this is 37mm × 178 mm × 40 mm, the weight is about 36g, and the price is 1,382yen(tax included).

via https://www.takaratomy-arts.co.jp/specials/smartpotatochips/ (Japanese)

Smart Speaker teach you how to take out the garbage

Take out garbage is a very troublesome daily routine. Especially in Japan, waste separation is very complicated. So, Shaxware and Kobe City in Hyogo Prefecture released the Gomi-Maru, a garbage guide application link with Amazon Alexa.

This is an application that tells you about the types of garbage and how to take out each. For example, when you're busy doing housework or childcare, talking to an Alexa-equipped device, then it will tell you the classification of garbage in Kobe City and Toyohashi City, Aichi Prefecture, and the date of garbage collection by region.

If it's a smart speaker, users can control it with their voice, which is useful for older people with blindness, blind people and disabled people. With devices that have screens like Amazon Echo Spot and Amazon Echo Show, users can see what they've checked on the screen.
Shaxware launched its service for their hometown, Toyohashi, Aichi in August 2018, and in September 2018, they won the Life Category for the Alexa Skills Award 2018. They are recruiting other local governments that want to use this. The application is offered free at the Alexa Skills Store.