KFC Partners With Baidu to Open Smart Restaurants

By Vishal Goel, | December 25, 2016

A customer in China visiting a smart interactive kiosk. (YouTube)

A customer in China visiting a smart interactive kiosk. (YouTube)

Chinese tech giant Baidu has partnered with the American food-chain company KFC to open a smart restaurant in Beijing that recommends meals to customers by scanning their faces. The smart kiosks will make the decision based on facial recognition technology, detecting the customer's age, gender, and their mood on the basis of their facial expression.

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The restaurant is also said to offer augmented reality games via table stickers. Such games are currently available at 300 other KFC locations in Beijing. However, the facial recognition technology is unique to this one new restaurant.

This is not the first time Baidu has partnered with KFC to build a smart restaurant. The search giant previously worked with KFC on another type of smart restaurant at a pilot location in Shanghai, where a robot customer service agent listens and recognizes orders made by customers using natural language input.

In a recent press release, Baidu said that the system would recommend a male customer in his early twenties to order a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings, and coke for lunch while a female customer in her fifties to order porridge and soybean milk for breakfast.

The setup will also have built-in recognition which means that it will remember its frequent customers and their previous orders and suggest meals based on their past favorites.

For now, KFC's facial recognition kiosks are confined to only one smart restaurant, which is located in Beijing. However, if it takes off, the technology might be available in other locations.

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