Startup says sound waves can replace fire sprinklers; experts aren’t so sure

Acoustic fire suppression goes commercial.

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[Fatesrider]

Sounds cool, but after watching the video, I'm not impressed. For a fire that size, if I was in the room, I would turn the burner off and put a lid on the pan and wait until it all cooled down on it's own. If I wasn't in the room, my smoke alarm in the living room would surely go off and get my attention. I wouldn't want fire suppression (water or infrasonic) triggering at that stage of a fire.

Also, if you look at the right side of the video, you can see the drapes flapping around, which makes me wonder what the likelihood of this system tossing something else flammable into the fire, or even worse, blowing the hot oil out of the pan and making the whole thing worse.

My thought was, did it turn off the stove?

I mean, if the fire started because of grease or overcooking, you HAVE to remove the heat source to keep it from reigniting.

Residential use seems very misplaced, and grotesquely optimistic. People get a fire, and they typically run.

Where I CAN see this being useful is in a commercial setting, since grease fires are going to be attended, and can't always be prevented. But you're going to have to train the AI to not start blasting the food if open flame and flare cooking are common (as they are for a lot of Asian/Eastern style cooking). And that, I can see, is less useful. So a manual activation would make more sense. The whole integration with AI is pretty stupid, and looks like the weakest link in this idea.