Atomi Smart Coffee Maker review

Most home filter coffeemakers have barebones planning capabilities, but you can go a step further with a “smart” coffee maker. Atomi is a company that makes one of the most popular smart coffee makers that you can buy. At $ 90, is it worth it, and how “smart” is this coffee maker? Find out more in our Atomi Smart Coffee Maker review.

About this Atomi Smart Coffee Maker test: I used the Atomi Smart Coffee Maker for two weeks with software version 1.0.2.

Atomi Smart Coffee Maker: What is it?

The Atomi Smart Coffee Maker is a simple drip brewery for the home with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa compatibility. Once you are connected to the services of Google and Amazon, you can ask your Assistant or Alexa to brew you a cup of coffee with your voice. It also connects directly to the Atomi smart app so that you can control the device from your smartphone even if you are not in the smart home ecosystems of Google or Amazon.

Functionally, it resembles a “stupid” coffee machine. It has a stainless steel and plastic design and comes with a 12-cup glass carafe and a reusable coffee filter insert. It offers regular and strong brewing modes that can be triggered via a button on the coffee machine itself or in the Atomi app.

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There are five buttons on the front of the device: WiFi, hours / minutes, power, timer and the switch for strong / regular brewing. You can still make coffee even if you haven’t set up any of the smart features. This is a nice touch in case your WiFi goes down. The coffee machine also has an automatic switch-off function that is triggered after 45 minutes.

What is good?

It brews coffee pretty well

I have to be honest here: I haven’t made filter coffee in a long time, so I just remember how it tastes compared to my V60 brewer. For the most part, I was very lucky with the coffee quality of the Atomi Smart Coffee Makers.

Water is dispensed from the six holes in the top lid of the coffee machine. Because of the deep brew basket, beers with a large number of bottoms are also likely to be completely covered with water. My old $ 40 Mr. Coffee machine had an uneven brewing problem, so this is a nice change of pace.

As mentioned earlier, there are two settings: normal and strong. In my tests, the normal brewing method for a 12 ounce brew took about four minutes. The strong setting, on the other hand, took about five minutes with the same amount of coffee. I definitely prefer the strong environment, and I think most other people will too.

Compatibility with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa

Once you’ve set it up (more on that later), controlling your coffee maker with Alexa or Assistant is fantastic. Functionality is limited to simple commands like “start coffee maker”, but they work reliably once you shut them down. During my tests, I never had problems with poor WiFi or connectivity with Assistant or Alexa.

Scheduling in the Atomi app

We’ll get into the nuances of the Atomi app in a minute, but I think the in-app scheduling feature comes in very handy. You can set the coffee maker to switch on at a specific time of the day and specify the days on which the coffee maker should switch on at a specific time. You can also specify the brew strength when setting your schedule.

Many coffee machines let you set a schedule for the next day, but not many offer weekly schedules.

What’s not so good?

The setup process could be better

The Atomi Smart Coffee Maker is connected to the Atomi mobile app, which you may already have installed if you have another Atomi product. The app is fine. It’s not very well designed and certain parts can be confusing to navigate.

Connecting the coffee maker to the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa can be confusing if you are new to smart home products. Atomis App contains extremely basic instructions. They’re specifically for setting up Amazon Echo or Google Home devices – not all that helpful if you’re trying to set up a coffee maker. Not to mention the instructions are based on the iOS app and aren’t specifically tailored for Android.

Voice commands are extremely (extremely!) Picky

As soon as you have set up the coffee machine with the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, you can find out for yourself which voice commands you can actually use. The compatible commands are not listed anywhere on the Atomi website.

Plus, they’re so picky. Here’s what I found for every voice assistant:

It’s frustrating when you ask the assistant to turn on the coffee maker and then get an error message when you ask them to turn off the coffee maker. I just do not understand. This is also not due to the fact that the Atomi coffee machine has the wrong name in both apps. The Google Home app says “coffee maker” but the assistant still can’t see “turn off coffee maker”.

It’s not very smart

See above for the voice commands you can use with the coffee maker. Really, you can only ask Assistant or Alexa to turn the coffee maker on or off. You cannot change the brew strength, set timers or specify that coffee should be brewed at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. With the name “smart” you would expect more functions to be available here.

Regarding reviews on Amazon

The negatives are easy to deal with, but we have to do it when you’re spending almost $ 100 on a filter coffee maker. As of this writing, 17% of the ratings on Amazon are 1/5 stars. Many users cite cracks in the hot plate, frequent interruptions in WiFi and leaking water reservoirs. Some even say the coffee maker stops working after just a few months. In particular, I did not encounter any of these issues during my time using the coffee maker.

However, I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the overly positive 5-star reviews on the Atomi website either.

Atomi Smart Coffee Maker Review: Should You Buy It?

No, I don’t think you should buy the Atomi Smart coffee maker. Coffee, while brewing well, is expensive and the overall experience is chunky. Add to this the growing number of bad reviews on Amazon, and I think you are playing a game of luck buying this product.

Atomi’s main competitor is the Hamilton Beach Smart Coffee Maker, which works with Alexa (but unfortunately not with Assistant). It’s also available for $ 90 on Amazon and has far fewer negative reviews across the board.

Alternatively, a filter coffee machine with an intelligent plug is always an option if you want to make your coffee preparation a little smarter, but also want to save some money.

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