There's a new level of excitement over at Kentucky Fried Chicken's outlets outside the United States. One of KFC's Chinese outlets is using facial recognition to make ordering a treat.
KFC patrons can simply approach a display in one of the KFC outlets in Beijing and it will suggest what they should order just by studying their faces. This is possible through Baidu's facial recognition technology.
KFC and Baidu, known as the "Google of China", is working on determining if the latter's facial recognition technology is capable of guessing one's preference just by analyzing the facial expressions. In other words, the display, particularly Baidu's algorithm, studies, and guesses the patron's mood, age, gender, and facial expression. Once it comes to a conclusion, the machine will choose the food that fits the mood.
Hot Hardware cited some specific examples:
"A man in his 20s might get a suggestion for a crispy chicken burger, chicken wings, and the healthiest part of the meal, a Coca-Cola. A woman in her 50s, by contrast, could be recommended a delicious porridge and soybean milk for breakfast."
The tech is based on different kinds of metrics. Machine learning is also instrumental in this new feature of KFC.
The meals suggested by the facial recognition tech are not final, of course. Customers can always change the orders to anything that they actually prefer.
Tech Crunch reported that this is not KFC's first foray into operating a "smart restaurant". It has also worked with Baidu before to incorporate a robot in a Shanghai branch.
Some patrons may find this as an intrusion of privacy as the machine will be taking their photographs mad record voices of those who choose to speak to it. Online privacy has become an issue in recent times. In fact, only recently, a Chinese company was discovered to have placed software in budget Android smartphones that are sold in the United States. This software sends personal data from the phone back to the Chinese company.
There are no announcements yet if this will be adopted in other countries.
