This Chennai Restaurant Has Robot Waiters Who Can Speak In English & Tamil

Movies like ‘Blade Runner 2049‘, ‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Terminator’ are often not taken seriously because they are relegated to the science-fiction genre. And what’s combined with humanity’s fear of extinction, they tend to ignore the direction in which our species is heading.

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IIT Hyderabad has already started a B.Tech degree course on artificial intelligence. There’s a restaurant in Boston that’s almost completely run by robots and is serving food to people since last year. And Chennai has combined both of those aspects for a restaurant in Porur.

According to India Today, a ‘Robot Restaurant’ has recently opened in Chennai’s Porur, where the robots not only serve food, but also interact with the customers in English and Tamil. General Manager Kailash said that,

“We have three branches in India. The robots will interact with customers and guide them with the table numbers. As there was no Robot Restaurant in India before, we worked on it and got successful.”

Your experience with the robots will start at the reception, where you’ll be met with an A.I. receptionist who’ll tend to your queries and guide to you to your table. And although the waiter-robots haven’t been named yet, Kailash has promised that he’ll allow the customers to name them. He added,

“We have two types of robots, one for serving food and the other one to interact and guide the customers. We are planning to expand our chain in Bengaluru.”

Each of the robots at the restaurant comes at a cost of Rs. 5 Lakh. The hotel staff are knowledgeable enough to operate them and stay in contact with their makers. Kailash said,

“We have provided a tablet on every table which has the menu. Once the customers select their choice of dishes, the order is sent to the kitchen. From there, the order is collected by the robots and they are programmed in a way that they take the order to the right table.”

In case you’re wondering what kind of food you’ll get there, the cuisine is Indo-Asian.

Waiting isn’t a job that probably requires a lot of skills. But it appears that abb woh naukri bhi gayi. And if people don’t wake up and smell the coffee, then maybe every other job will be taken over by robots, who’ll then take over the city and then the whole world. Or maybe I’m overthinking it and this is just a cute update to the restaurant in Chennai.

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