‘First Robotic Bar Experience in the World’ Heads to the Las Vegas Strip

Showmanship/Entertainment. The whole point of being in Vegas or on a cruise ship (prior installation), is to have a spectacular experience. An efficient, mundane, McD's dispenser isn't quite the same.

That's a drink machine, not a step toward a humanoid, which is what people find interesting.

How do you get around cross contamination?

I don't want sugary crap in my $100 bottle of whiskey on the rocks.

I guess you could use water to flush part of the tube system.

But I'd have to trust it.

For all alcohol (And food) a big part of the reason you buy it is anchored impressions. It's never 100% about the taste. How it's served is important.

Reminds me of this. http://i.imgur.com/tpqNUAd.gifv

Waiting is so 2016!

Actually, in Europe we have table service at a lot of bars, it beats any of this hands down, while being engaged in a good conversation the beer and anything else you like is delivered to your table. It doesn't get much better than that IMO.

There's a bar in Santa Cruz that gives you an RFID bracelet hooked up to your CC, and you pour however much you want from >30 taps on the wall. Then you pay your per-ounce tab upon exit. Only beer and wine but a cool idea. Here's a link: http://www.pourtaproom.com/santa-cruz/

Could have one attendant supervising 2-3 vending machines in a busy venue. In supermarkets in Australia, one attendant supervises 6-8 automated checkouts and it works well.

If not vending machines, at least separate the expensive cocktail mixing from the beer and wine orders. It's painful waiting to order a round of bottled beers when the person just in front of you wants 5 random cocktails.

There are bars in Europe where each table has its own beer tap in the middle, and you are charged by volume poured. Nice gimmick.

I think you make a good point. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. A very common mistake from engineers who become entrepreneurs is to not understand the markets they're trying to enter, or even their customers. They think they have a cool tech solution and everybody will see the world like they do. Then they launch and find out they have a novelty that loses money.

I don't know the specifics of this business, but trying to build a robot for X without understanding X is a great way to lose money.

> A good bartender on a busy night can make ~100 drinks an hour

The article states they're good for 120 drinks/hour. FWIW.

As someone who has used the Makr Shakr system, not having to wait for waitstaff to come around, wait for them to write down your custom drink order, wait while they walk around and ask anybody else if they want anything, wait for bartender to make the drinks, wait for waitstaff to bring the drinks back to your table... a pretty slow process from start to finish.

The robotic bartender experience was far superior, and allowed you to customize your drink, save it for future ordering, and have it prepared with automated precision (so it tasted the exact same, every time.) And because you could queue up orders whenever you wanted, you were never looking around for waitstaff. It was great!

Admittedly this is a much different scenario than a bar in a college town on $1 draft night, but I don't think that's the target of this "first gen" robotic bartender.

Seriously though, I bet eventually we'll have a robot that can do that far more accurately than a human. Like a jet from one of those 'jumping fountains', of liquor, 20 feet away, nothing but net.

It reminds me of CafeX, which makes coffee. In the case of CafeX, it's mostly ostentatious. There is very little functional purpose for the arm, and that arm is not cheap. When I went to try it in SF there was just one person in front of me, but there was a paid employee who apologized for the machine queueing drinks incorrectly which made it even slower than it already was. Basically instead of using one of the 2 coffee makers, it waited for the previous order to finish before making my drink. So from a functional perspective, at least in that instance, they made the coffee vending machine worse and roughly 10x as expensive, and then another 10x as expensive if you consider real estate. To be fair, the coffee was good, not great.

In this case though, it looks like the arms actually serve an important function - shaking. I have no idea how well it works as I've never tried it.

With regards to the unit economics of these things I don't know the details, but people often underestimate how expensive these are by as much as an order of magnitude.

If you wanted efficiency, you could drink at home.

A bar tender is a combination entertainer-crowd-controller.

This a robotic/novelty emulation of a bar tender. Once the novelty wears off, they'll have to be much entertaining.

There is an invisible "sensor curtain" around the robots. I accidentally put my camera too far "in" and the robots stopped instantly. As soon as the attendant saw everything was OK (and helpfully explained to me what happened) she pushed a "resume" button on the control panel and they continued right where they left off.

What optimism! Keep in mind, they'll put out tip jars at self service froyo places if it will dupe someone into think it's expected.

It's hard to tell because they kept having cuts and slowmo. It would be nice to see a video of a full drink being made.

Still, even a slow robot is preferred to having to wait for attention from the bartender before putting in your order. It's so frustrating to have to break away from an interesting conversation so that you could keep your eye on the bartender as he/she slowly makes their way to your area of the bar.

I'm at a bar to socialize, not to wait several minutes away from my friends trying to make eye contact with the bartender.

The article claim 120 drinks pr. hour, which certainly sounds like more than a human could do.