Smalt

In case your dining table is out of Alexa's hearing range, your salt shaker can spy on your conversations instead.

What will be next? Plates and cups that watch what you consume and report to a central site on what you eat? Or has that already been developed? The mind boggles!

Concerned about salt intake? Leave it off the table. Then you will not have to worry that the smart salt shaker is going to berate you.

agent j

The connected plates and cups would actually be a great idea. When you start a diet, the second hardest thing is to keep track of what you eat (the hardest thing being to resist peer pressure during social obligations). Nutritionists could lend those plates and cups to patients for a week and use the data to build a diet plan. The plates could be transparent, with the camera located under it and in a kind of handle on the side, while the cups could have the sensor entirely on the side, and the camera could be removable for washing. I bet the Apple Store would sell a lot of those plate and cups. The most annoying would be the tsunami of ads about food that you will receive in your computer after the first use.

Dunno, I really prefer the blue pigment.

(No, seriously. Smalt is cobalt... oxide? Some cobalt mineral, anyway, and it makes the most gorgeous blue glass, and when ground down finely, equally beautiful blue pigment for painting and calligraphy.)