KFC’s Smart Restaurant Suggests What To Order Based On Your Facial Expression

KFC is partnering with Baidu to open a smart restaurant which can make recommendations based on a customer’s facial expression.

KFC’s restaurant ordering kiosks, which are powered by Baidu’s tech, will look at the customer’s age, gender and facial expressions to guess what the might be in the mood for.

Baidu wrote in a press release that the KFC kiosks would suggest “a male customer in his early 20s” to order “a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings and coke for lunch,” while “a female customer in her 50s” would get a suggestion of “porridge and soybean milk for breakfast.”

Customers might not be a fan of the suggestions the system comes up with, but they are just suggestions. The setup has built-in recognition, so if you’re a frequent customer, it can remember what you previously ordered before and suggest your favorite meals.

The restaurant also offers augmented reality games via the table stickers, but they are used at 300 KFC locations in Beijing, according to TechCrunch. As far as the facial recognition tech it’s set to this one location, though Baidu has tried to work with KFC on another smart restaurant in Shanghai, where a robot can listen to orders made by customers using natural language input.

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