Chinese tech giant Baidu has partnered with KFC China to set up an innovative new “smart restaurant” in Beijing. The venture aims to use the company’s latest technologies to bring novel ways of providing service to KFC customers.
The company also known as “the Google of China,” is now utilizing facial recognition technology in the new diner to make recommendations on what customers might order, Techcrunch reported. The system makes the decision based on the ordering person’s age, gender, and even facial expression.
As an added feature, the outlet also offers augmented reality games via table stickers, a concept also made available to 300 other KFC locations in Beijing.
While the facial recognition system can only be found in this one location, Baidu has previously worked with KFC on a different type of smart restaurant in Shanghai. The pilot store uses a robot customer service agent who listens and recognizes orders made by customers using language input.
The new restaurant does away with the listening and assumes what customers want before they ask. Using the installed image recognition hardware at the outlet, the customers’ faces are scanned to check their moods, gender and guess their age and then provide recommendations.
In a press release, the company said that the face recognition device would recommend to “a male customer in his early 20s, a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings and coke for lunch.” For “a female customer in her 50s” on the other hand, her recommendation may consist of “porridge and soybean milk for breakfast.”
Of course, these are merely suggestions, and customers can always deviate from the offers given. That means you don’t have to settle for a porridge if you don’t feel like it.
Another useful feature is its ability to recognize a returning patron and ‘remember’ what you ordered before and can make suggestions based on your past meals.
If in case this technology further improves and finally catches on to restaurants everywhere, it would be a very news for those who get indecisive when they get their turn at ordering queues.
