This smart toothbrush claims to have its very own ‘embedded AI’

In 2013’s Her, retro teddy bear Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an artificial intelligence that lives in his ear. At CES in 2017, tech company Kolibree is asking, “what if you fell in love with your toothbrush instead?”

Well, sort of. The company has unveiled its latest product, the Ara, which it claims is the “first toothbrush with embedded AI.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that some sultry-voiced operating system will whisper sweet nothings to you while you’re brushing your teeth (they’d be pretty muffled anyway), but a bunch of sensors in the brush will monitor how long you use it each day and which areas of your mouth you you hit. This data will be analyzed in the toothbrush itself by Kolibree’s “patented deep learning algorithms,” and recommendations on how to up your brushing game will be sent to your phone or emailed to you once a week. Functionally, it’s nearly identical to Kolibree’s first smart toothbrush introduced in 2014.

So, yeah, this isn’t really AI, but more you-missed-a-spot for dental hygiene. Still, putting the computing components in the toothbrush itself is neat, and the Ara also comes with mobile games (yes, games you play by brushing your teeth) that could encourage children to learn good habits earlier in life. The Ara is available to preorder now for a temporary price of $80 and will cost $130 when it goes on sale and ships this March.

Who knows, you might even fall in love with it.