A series of futuristic restaurants have popped up across China allowing diners to forego the usual anxiety of choosing what to order, by letting AI make the decision for you
There is perhaps nothing worse than sitting down at a restaurant, poring over a menu, and having absolutely no idea what you want to order. How many times have you sat down for a Chinese and been hit by selection paralysis, desperately flipping through pages of noodles and stir-fries to try and work out what it is you want.
Diners in China however, do not have that problem, at least those choosing to eat at the country’s newly-opened range of AI run restaurants, which use artificial intelligence bots to ascertain exactly what food you will enjoy most.
These futuristic eateries see people replaced with bots in almost every capacity: from front of house to the cooks in the kitchen.
AI-powered robots in the East of China have been trained to cook hundreds of dishes in attempts to cut costs, with restaurants in the country’s Zhejiang province also seeing bots handle ordering, serving, cleaning and cooking, according to local reports.
In some locations robots are used for 60% of all tasks, replacing much of the human workforce
Incredibly, one location in the regions Xihu district has gone one step further, using eight different robots to not just make the food and take orders, but to actually interrogate diner’s bodies in order to see what they want to eat.
24 Jieqi Robot Restaurant uses “AI analysis” obtained by scanning the faces and even tongues of punters, before making them answer a series of questions about themselves.
The culinary-minded AI bots then create a detailed report about the customer’s lifestyle, emotional status and digestion before making a recommendation.
The Robo-restaurant’s boss Cai Haitang explained that their bots can cook more than one hundred different dishes from a menu that changes based on seasonal produce.
Depending on the AI’s assessment, customers can enjoy the likes of three cup chicken, which is a stewed dish made use poultry, rice wine, soy sauce and sesame oil, as well as crab roe tofu and braised pork trotters.
Haitang also said that the restaurant’s techno-chefs are especially good at making a dish called Pian Er Chuan, which is a local speciality soup noodle with preserved vegetables, sliced pork and bamboo shoots.
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