Dyson's $499 AI toothbrush has a camera that watches your teeth

Dyson spent six years and put 661 engineers on the problem of food stuck between your teeth, and the answer has a camera in it.

What Dyson built

The CameraJet is Dyson’s first toothbrush, and the spec sheet reads like a flagship phone. A 100,000-pixel macro camera scans at 28 images per second. A machine learning system, trained on about 470,000 dental images and running on 16 million lines of code, finds the gaps between teeth in real time and fires a precision burst of mouth rinse at each one within about 100 milliseconds, so brushing, flossing and rinsing happen in a single pass. The rinse tank holds 12.5 milliliters and refills in about three seconds. Dyson says the project involved 38 patents and 30 dental professionals.

The claims and the caveats

Dyson’s own laboratory testing puts plaque removal in hard-to-reach areas at up to 69 percent more than leading electric toothbrushes. That is a company figure, not independent clinical data. On the obvious privacy question, Dyson says the camera operates only while brushing modes are active and that images are not stored on the device or in the cloud.

Why it matters

Preorders opened September 1 at $499, in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink. The price sits far above any conventional electric toothbrush, and the pitch is that the camera and model do work a person cannot: seeing between the teeth and reacting faster than a hand can move. It is a clear marker of where consumer hardware is heading, with a lens and a model added to a category that never had either, including the inside of the mouth.