Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffdubin | Hacker News Reader

2019 = Order via speech recognition

2020 = Automated kitchen systems prepare ingredients

2021 = Burrito preparation via robotics

2021 = End-to-end order fulfillment without human involvement

Just a matter of time before raw ingredients are lab grown and harvested by robots. Not too long ago, this was pure fantasy. Only now is it starting to look inevitable, for better or for worse.

View on HN

The robots will still somehow make the burritos too large and the tortilla not properly contain it.

I guess what I don't understand is why we don't have more human-free systems for food payment. All of 15 years ago, I went in a company cafeteria in Tsukuba, paid a vending machine, and took the ticket to the cook. If I had been able to speak any Japanese back then, I probably could have customized my order there. But here in the US we're still hiring fast food workers to take standardized orders.

Because Japan's demographics made it imperative and conversely our importation of cheap labor subsidized or delayed the need to introduce automation to offset costs.

Coin-operated vending machines for food was actually somewhat popular in the US in the early 1900ds before fast-food. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

There's a burger chain here in the Bay Area called The Melt which has iPad-based kiosks where you can order your food, pay for it with a credit card, and pick up a buzzer (to let you know when it's ready) without having to talk to anyone. It's glorious. I wish all restaurants offered stuff like that.

They're starting to appear. McDonalds has now introduced it in multiple European countries, plus isolated restaurants here and there (e.g. Burgerlich in Hamburg, which has touchscreens embedded in the tables: https://goo.gl/oJAh9v)

Almost every McDonald's I've been to in Europe and Canada has a set of Kiosks where you can order what you want (in English) and pay. You then take a number from the kiosk and sit down and somebody brings your food out to you or screens display your pickup number when it's time. Most ones in the U.S. have stubbornly held on to the less efficient queue at the counter and talk to a bored human system.

You can order McDs on a touchscreen at some locations in Cambridge (Massachusetts not England), it's already made it to America.

Had the same thought when I was in Tokyo and seeing it more frequently in Scotland where there are more self-serve kiosks at McDonalds than there are regular tills.

There is a small chance that we will see something like Star Trek food replicators in our lifetime.

Do you mean matter replication (no we won't as this violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle similar to the transporter), or something akin to a very complex vending machine that can make things from Ramen to Fajitas?

The latter, a very fancy food printer.

It's still pure fantasy.

every one of the constituent parts presently exist, if in early forms. i think his timetable is far too compressed though.

A burrito making robot sounds like a great kickstarter.

Voice based ordering is already available through Alexa and their iPhone app, cmg just behind the times

Reply on news.ycombinator.com