I am smarter than my toothbrush

AI is being fed to us more every day. Now we can brush our teeth with it.

Confession time: I am one of those strange people that ENJOYS a visit to the dental hygienist. Is it the routine? The sensation of the high-powered ultrasonic scaler? The smugness of not having ANY fillings? It being accepted to conduct my side of the conversation with just the occasional nod and sounds like, “MMHHFFMMFMF”?

It is all of these things, and the ritual of the hygienist attempting to upsell me the latest and greatest electric toothbrush.

This time, she was successful.

This time, the electric toothbrush has ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

AI will not win. In this article, I am confidently asserting that I am smarter than my toothbrush.

Getting my teeth into it

I picked up the Oral-B IO8 electric toothbrush. I was given a special discount code by the hygienist which could be redeemed on Oral-B’s website directly.

It has all the standard electric toothbrush features. You can charge it. When you press a button, it vibrates in your mouth. It even seems to clean your teeth!

A genuinely good feature is that a light lets you know if you are using the right amount of pressure. Blue? GO HARDER. Green? PERFECT. Red? WOAH TIGER, DIAL IT BACK A LITTLE.

The digital display will feed your cortex with judgemental smiley faces. If you don’t brush for at least two minutes you are going to get the frowning face of dental disappointment. For the first time in my life, I am being held to account by a toothbrush.

But there’s more. You can connect the vibrating twig of delight to your phone via Bluetooth!

Why? Well, if you have not yet quite worked out how to brush your teeth yet: There’s an app for that!

This is where the fabled Artificial Intelligence kicks in. The toothbrush works with the app to track where you are brushing, to ensure each zone is getting enough bristly love.

Except it doesn’t.

Adding gamification to brushing your teeth is one thing, but if your core tech is hamstrung by just not being accurate enough to do the job, it’s not a fun time.

Hitting all the right toothy zones increases your score. But the AI continuously misidentifies where in your mouth the toothbrush is. Is it due to the shape of my mouth? How I hold my toothbrush? I DON’T KNOW, I JUST WANT TO CLEAN MY TEETH, DON’T MAKE ME WORRY ABOUT THESE THINGS!

The problem is that this is all (bad) marketing: There’s no genuine AI at play here. There is no way of training the toothbrush to recognise the different parts of MY mouth. There’s no way of giving any feedback at all on how the recognition is performing. This makes it a dumb toothbrush, not a smart one.

Reviews around the Internet, such as this one from WIRED magazine, seem to confirm that the issue isn’t my mouth or wrist technique. I am relieved. It was the tech all along!

Left with a bad taste in my mouth, I no longer use the app. The smiley faces and 2 minute demands of my time, lit up by the soft LED lighting, will be enough for me.

At least until the next generation of toothbrushes come with WiFi uplinks direct to Generative AI models in the cloud.

Give it six months.

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