2. Smartshopper Grocery List Organizer

By: Barry Gerber

Smartshopper is an electronic speech-to-text gizmo that helps you create, maintain and print lists. Its focus is on grocery shopping lists, but with a little ingenuity you can use it for any kind of list such as parts lists for an automobile mod or a to-do list. College freshmen will find it handy for doing all those tasks they suddenly are responsible for now that they're away from home. Dads will appreciate the potential of the list maker for a range of tasks including those trips to the market that more and more fathers are participating in these days.

SmartShopper is a lot larger than it is in the photo above. At 7.25" high, 4.25" wide and 1.25" thick it doesn't fit in a shirt pocket at all and is no fun stuffing into a pants pocket either. Not to worry. Smartshopper was designed to stay put in your home or dorm room. It has a strong magnet on the back for sticking it on anything metallic such as a refrigerator door.

So, you're probably asking, "What good is an electronic list maker that you can't carry with you?" Well, as I noted earlier, SmartShopper prints out your list on a built-in 2.25" thermal printer. You take the easy to read black-type-on-white-paper printout with you, not the device itself.

How well does SmartShopper do at recognizing voice input? In my case it did very well indeed. Without any training at all, the device recognized all of the items in a 10 item list I entered while holding the unit in my hand. I'm 6' 3" but I can't place the list maker high enough on the refrigerator for me to use comfortably, because my wife is 5' 3". If I place it where it's comfortable for my wife, I have to crouch uncomfortably while talking into the device. Crouching reduced text-to-speech accuracy by about 25 percent. So, when I use the SmartShopper, I just pull it off the fridge and hold it in my hand while entering list items.

Speech-to-text accuracy is so good because Smartshopper has a large set of built-in words and each word has a set of associated sound patterns. You can train the device to better understand your voice and you can add words to Smartshopper. You can change the quantity of items in your list and flag list items you have coupons for.

Words are associated with categories such as Produce or Dairy and you can print out your list either alphabetically or sorted by category. Categorization makes it more likely that you'll have to visit each department in the store only once.

You can enter additional words, but not categories. So, for lists of non-grocery items, you'll only be able to print meaningful lists sorted alphabetically. Smartshopper can only store one list at a time. So, you can't have more than one list you can update regularly, such as a grocery list and a to-do list.

At $150 SmartShopper could be an ideal gift for the person who uses neither a computer nor a PDA/smartphone to manage lists. It comes with three rolls of thermal printing paper, a book listing all the words in its memory and an instruction sheet. The device uses four AA batteries, which are not included. In my experience, battery life is very good with either Alkalines or NiMH rechargeables.