REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

Hopefully not coming to a cafe near you: a talking coffee maker that always brews the perfect cuppa joe.

MIT undergraduates Joseph Kay, 20, and Niko Matsakis, 18, lured Comdex attendees to spend a few moments with Mr. Java, a coffee machine that recognizes a user’s personal drink preferences.

A small chip sealed to the bottom of a mug tells the machine which drink to make and what kind of music or news programming the user wants to hear while the beans are brewing. Once it recognizes the user, the machine can then pull audio clips off the Internet.

“The whole idea behind Mr. Java is to look at what happens when a computer knows your preferences and eliminates waste,” said Kay. The $26,000 project is sponsored by MIT Media Lab’s “The Things That Think,” a consortium devoted to finding new applications for technology. Let’s hope they’ll keep looking.