Kabuga

Mpishi is an extra pair of eyes for your stove. Many people can’t keep watching a pot: someone with low vision, an older person living alone, a parent pulled away by a child, or anyone cooking several things at once. Mpishi watches the stove through a phone or laptop camera and stays silent until the cook needs to know something. If a burner looks lit and nobody is near, it reminds the cook at 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes, explains why in plain words, and repeats serious alerts until the cook acknowledges them. It works hands-free: say “Mpishi, set a timer for five minutes”, “add cabbage”, or ask a question. For each dish it builds a time guide from a web search, with a separate clock per item. It speaks English and Kiswahili and says “I can’t tell” when unsure. It also tracks its own cost: every Meta API call is logged (tokens, SAM images, voice minutes) and a live cost per cook shows on screen, an estimate from Meta’s published prices that stayed in cents in my tests. It is a prototype and an extra layer of awareness, not a smoke alarm. It cannot see inside food or measure temperature.