We can rebuild it; we have the technology!

March 7, 2013 4:34 PM

Could we build a functioning Cafe 80's with today's technology? Assuming the food prep is done by actual humans 'backstage,' is voice recognition technology good enough today to create mechanized waiters as seen in Back to the Future, part II? (I assume they've got collision detection sensors to avoid hitting patrons, and can seat patrons by navigating on rails to the proper table.)
posted by percor to technology (9 answers total)

I'm going to go with Yes.
You can test modern untrained voice recognition by using an android smartphone to dictate a text message. You will get better recognition performance than that in the cafe though, due to the context-limiting provided by ordering off a menu. (Potentially complicating things, you don't want background noise - people chatting in a nearby booth - to interfere, however there are lots of ways to work around this, and these days those options would even include the computer identifying you face and watching for your mouth movements.)

OTOH, Keep It Simple, Stupid: you could just make it like the electronic ordering of a drive-through system, except instead of the cashier talking to the customer on an intercom, they talk by proxy through animated computer responses.

Would it be a profitable Cafe? I'm going to go with That May Be More Difficult. The more overhead and maintenance involved, the harder it will be to break even. A lot of this stuff is going to be custom installations of a technical nature, and some repairs for that are not going to be like a busted tap where any plumber in the phone book can help.
posted by anonymisc at 5:41 PM on March 7 [1 favorite]

Definitely possible. But it all comes down to money.
posted by oceanjesse at 6:00 PM on March 7

Mechanized waiters? Sure. anonymisc went through the main technology issues already. A waiter needs to interact with people in a fairly formalized context, then carry out food to the table -- but it could easily come out on a tray and then be taken off the tray by the diners.

The hard part is the mechanical busboy. A table that people have eaten at has a mix of dirty dishes and used cutlery as well as things like salt & pepper shakers that don't get removed; maybe somebody forgot their purse as well. These things will be in an unpredictable location, and plates and glassware are fragile. (Plus there may be a half-full drink that needs to be handled properly to avoid spilling.) The used dishes need to be removed, then the table wiped. It's a difficult task for robots. The easiest way would be to have a fast food type setup, and have empty tables tilt up and just slide everything into a mobile garbage bin that drives to the end of the table, and also has a squeegee arm. You could use all-metal tableware, and then use a magnet to retrieve it back in the kitchen.

And obviously, there would need to be someone not on rails to stop dine-n-dashers, dickheads who put ketchup on the seat and whatever else. Equally obviously, there is a limited value proposition in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid paying a handful of people who earn minimum wage or less. I don't think that the BTTF / 80s retro market is big enough yet to demand premium pricing.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 7:48 PM on March 7 [2 favorites]

Things are moving in that direction, a hip burger joint near me has a tablet you order off of and pay with credit on at every table. It's not voice recognition, touch-menu, but adding that wouldn't be much of a jump. The human staff is there only to to walk you through it and chat: http://stacked.com/

And to bus the tables of course, for the reasons Homeboy lays out so well above. The hurdle in developing robots to do menial work is that we live in an economy built off cheap labor. There's not much incentive to be the first one to outlay a bunch of capitol to design and build robots right now. Once some huge company (Google?) or wealthy investor does pay the initial NRE costs 2nd/ late adopters will accelerate the pick up though...
posted by oblio_one at 8:02 PM on March 7

I don't see why not. If we can use voice commands to do everything in our cars or on a smart phones, and if we can now build parts and stuff using machines instead of people, seems the only thing we don't have is a desire or market for such a place. I think the machines that would need to be built specifically for this and the software that would need to be developed specifically for this would be way too expensive to be a viable business venture. Maybe if only certain parts of the dining experience were automated by machines and others were handled by people.
posted by AppleTurnover at 8:07 PM on March 7

by the way - solid techniques exists now to deal with very noisy environments and filter out the background noise.

The idea is essentially to use 2-microphones and compare the timing on each signal, time; aka the distance from the mic. You can "triangulate" on where the desired noise is coming from ( tri. in quotes because with 2 mics you get two possible locations, for cell phones the are just ignoring the point in space behind the phone - for a waiter-bot you'd use a 3rd mic.)

http://www.ind.rwth-aachen.de/fileadmin/publications/jeub12.pdf
posted by oblio_one at 8:09 PM on March 7

Not sure if this helps, but I'd gladly park my Delorean out front. (for a small fee, of course. Still saving up for a hover conversion!)
posted by ShutterBun at 11:24 PM on March 7

Be sure to avoid municipalities that are banning lightgun videogames if you want to have that Wild Gunman cabinet in the corner.
posted by radwolf76 at 10:55 AM on March 8

Even on the food prep side there's a real push towards automation, as an actual business model: burger machine
posted by heliostatic at 2:28 PM on March 8