Smart mouth

Toothwise, I've been pretty fortunate. I inherited my mother's super teeth, not my father's not-so-great choppers. Plus, I've always had excellent dental care. As an adult, I've had more than one dentist tell me that I had must have seen a great dentist when I was a kid. (Thank you, Dr. Leo Wigdor!)

Since the Dr. Wigdor days, I've paid enough attention to my teeth to keep them in tip-top shape. (Other than using my front teeth as cutting implements, which caused chipping and ended me up with veneers.)

I have been told that my teeth should last me for my lifetime, which doesn't sound like all that much until you consider that one out of five Americans 65 years of age and older have no natural teeth left in their heads.

To keep my teeth healthy, I use a pretty basic electric toothbrush for my morning brushing. Most mornings, anyway. But often enough that my dental hygienist is happy with the decrease in dental plaque. As I said, my electric brush is pretty basic. Smart, but not all that smart. All is does is rapidly brush and pulse every 30 seconds to get me to move on to another quadrant of my teeth.

Another thing that using the electric toothbrush has done is make me more aware of just how few seconds I was brushing when I used the good old-fashioned manual method. So now, at night, when I do my bedtime brusha-brusha-brusha, I spend a bit longer than I once did. (But, I must admit, not the full electric 30 seconds.)

I can't remember what I paid for my electronic toothbrush set up. Not much. And I've got enough brushing heads in store that I won't need to order any more for another three years or so, so other than whatever electricity it consumes, it costs me nothing.

And I don't spend all that much on manual toothbrushes, either, asI get a new one every six months when I go for my cleaning. Since I swap out every three months (more frequently if I have a cold), I do have to buy a couple new brushes each year. They'll either be Oral-B or, when I can find them, Lactonas.

My manual toothbrushes aren't smart at all. Devoid of IQ, I like to think of them as having admirable EQ. Brushing your teeth is, after all, dentally, spiritually, nostalgically, and emotionally pretty darned satisfying.

Anyway, between my electric buddy and my old-school regulars, I'm content with my toothbrushes.

So I'm not interested in spending $399.99 for anOral-B iO™

SERIES 10 smart mouth of a toothbrush, which sports these swell features:

Interactive Color Display

3D TEETH TRACKING with A.I.

7 Smart Brushing Modes

Bluetooth® Connectivity

Smart Pressure Sensor

iO Senser™ Smart Charger

Charging Travel Case

4 Oral-B iO Ultimate Clean Replacement Brush Heads

You can get a smarty-pants smart mouth Oral-B for a lot less - there's a pretty wide range of prices - but you don't get all the goodies. At the lower end, you don't get color (or even b&w) display to tell you whether you're brushing too hard or too soft. And only at the high end do you get the Smart Charger. (Whatever that means. My dumb charger seems to do just fine.)

The high-end brush also provides "guidance," which uses Bluetooth and A.I. technology "to coach you to your best clean yet." 

Put me in coach? Who really needs it.

And about that A.I. technology, the Washington Post has its suspicion. In April, Shira Ovide had this to say: 

Marketing materials for the $400 version mention “AI Position Detection” — which sounds like a straightforward sensor to detect which teeth you’re brushing and for how long. There’s also “3D teeth tracking with AI” to show whether you’ve brushed successfully.

I asked representatives of Procter & Gamble, which owns Oral-B, what exactly is AI about this toothbrush. They declined to comment.

If you’re jazzed about nightly grades for your brushing, you do you. But this toothbrush doesn’t seem to have AI even under the squishiest definition of that term. (Source: WaPo)

AI is definitely in its hype cycle, so we can expect to see a lot more products claiming AI-ness when all they're doing is using sensors.

AI or sensors, matters not to me. I need an AI-driven, sensor- loaded toothbrush like I need a hole in my head other than my already smart enough mouth.