Ask HN: Why don’t restaurants have tables with androids that you can talk to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don’t restaurants have tables with androids that you can talk to?

12 pointsamichail42 comments

Chatbot tech is getting quite sophisticated these days and I think lonely people would like someone to talk to while they eat.

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Because

- it's not obvious that people want this

- if they did, they would get their AI-chat from their personal device, they don't need the restaurant to provide it and it doesn't need to be an android. Think more like the movie Her and less like a C-3PO sitting at every table.

> lonely people would like someone to talk to

Exactly, lonely people don't want to talk to a chatbot. If they wanted to, they would bring their own Android. Or iPhone, for that matter.

I mean, if I felt lonely, talking to a bot would probably only exacerbate that

> lonely people don't want to talk to a chatbot

Lonely people love talking to chatbots - look how popular Twitter is :)

Hm, true. Which would actually confirm my statement, they bring their chatbots to the restaurant.

But, are Twitter user lonely? I mean, do they perceive isolation and seek social connection?

I thought most of them are chatbots.

I'll take a more extreme position and say that I think this would be totally horrible! I already hate how restaurants have QR codes for you to order your food from their app/site. Have questions about something on the menu? Good luck flagging down an actual human to talk to. Are you traveling and want recommendations on where to go for cocktails later that evening? Well, you're just out of luck on that, aren't you? Talking robots would just be an expensive novelty and there's no evidence they would enhance peoples' dining experience in any way.

> questions about something on the menu?

> recommendations on where to go for cocktails later that evening?

The 'killer app' I see here initially would be highly streamlined chatbots who specialize on providing details exactly like these and little else. City-specific dialog trees along with neighborhood & restaurant-specific ones. Things that are harder to search for on your phone.

These might be expensive to develop (one of the keys would be determining all the fields you'd want a restaurant manager/employee to fill out, and which are required vs. optional), but as in so many other cases, with scaling I could see it being popular and profitable.

As far as just having someone to talk with, though, I'm afraid chatbots will likely remain less than ideal for a while yet. "Tell me an interesting story about this place" is more of something one or two people could realistically provide several responses on for all future customers. A lot of places already print stuff like that on their menus. Of course, then you need additional humans for vetting the stories... it wouldn't be cheap, but it seems doable.

eta: You'd want to vary the voice style used if possible and/or find other ways to make a room of 20+ people interacting with these things not sound annoying as hell too, of course.

Is there any evidence that customers would want that? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should

Yes. The fact that a lot of people prefer ordering from a screen at a macdonalds, compared to ordering from a person.

That's a transaction and it's completely different from wanting to chit-chat with a robot while you eat.

That's not evidence that they'd like to talk to a bot

Do people really prefer that, or is that just a faster alternative?

I personally hate using self-checkout/self-ordering kiosks so I am surprised that others actually prefer doing these things without there being a carrot such as "faster" or "cheaper".

I do, well, /because/ it's a faster alternative (why is it a "carrot"?). I absolutely hate waiting in lines and I don't always feel like talking to people. It's not like I need recommendations at a McDonalds, so if I can just quickly input my order into a kiosk and skip the entire dance, I will.

I frame it as a "carrot" only because I hate using these kiosks and thus would need some incentive. The "stick" side of that metaphor for me is a nagging impression that companies that use them want to foist work on to their customers rather than provide service of any kind.

I prefer it. I will go out of my way to go to a store with self checkout vs one without. Probably due to anxiety/autism, but being able to remove the human element makes things much easier for me.

I 100% prefer self-checkout. I generally have no interest in interacting with strangers and am faster at checking out to boot

Isn't that kind of a self-selecting biased take? I haven't eaten at McD in about 20 years. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

McDonald's is not a sit-down restaurant.

I primarily use the touchscreen at McDonald's when I suspect the cashier doesn't speak English.

I've never had an issue with a table-service restaurant! (Except when I can't speak the local language.)

Isn't it a proof of the opposite ?

If they really were lonely and craving human interactions wouldn't they just... talk to the human that's behind the counter ?

I feel like people use these screens exactly for the opposite reason: aka avoiding human interactions

The screens that make it take 4x as long to order as just telling a human what you want? People like those?

Mickey D's is that last place I would go to order food. I only use them as a restroom when traveling.

As you are finding out from the responses here, this is such a nightmarish idea that people would actively avoid a restaurant that did this

"OK Table, Ill get the caloni the lemoncello and the veal"

"Anyway, like I was saying, Tommy Two Times gotsa go. Kapish. You send that fat fuck a message from me. Make sure he dont rat me out. Got it?"

"Yes boss"

There used to be a restaurant chain in the north east that had a talking buffalo head in the dining area. I hated that thing as it interrupted human conversation.

Because it would be extremely creepy.

This is the most Silicon Valley question I've ever heard asked. If you want to talk to strangers while you eat, eat at the bar.

Super annoying as well. The first thing that will happen is it will look at what you're talking about (and eating) and suggest what you should spend money on.

Someone will make a restaurant with free food that's monetised by advertisements. They'll sell your data and robots will chase you around town with offers.

It will soon degenerate into a herd of mobile 'stuffers' who will force feed you....brings back memories...

There was a restaurant in ~2006/7? in dowtown Mountain View that was all electronic ordering at your table...

It didnt last very long.

I don't mind ordering from a kiosk, but I don't want to be conversational with said kiosk.

Either give me a person to talk to, or give me a list from which to choose. A chatbot sounds like the worst of all possible worlds.

I've thought a bit about "sessile robots" that appear on a screen that watch you with machine vision and can make eye contact and look like somebody on the other side of the mirror who is sharing the space with you.

It's obviously beyond state of the art but it's easier than making a physical machine with 16+ joints.

For a few years I've wanted to build something that creates this illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

There have been many musical performances with that sort of character but I'd like to do a sketch comedy routine with

https://hyperdimensionneptunia.fandom.com/wiki/Neptune

or barring that with some generic Unreal Engine character but for it to be any good you still need a voice actor, of course all the dialog is written ahead of time, it's probably enough working building the projection system that I'll give up on using machine vision to cue it so I'll have to cue it with a clicker... and what really dooms the project is that I'm just not funny.

Lonely people that would like someone to talk to while they eat can just do that with their own phones.

The hospitality industry already fills this role. Bartenders, host/hostess clubs (Japan), strip clubs, escort services. There are plenty of ways to essentially pay for companionship.

Chatbot tech might be mature but the physical robots never look anywhere near convincing. Maybe a face on a screen but...we all have smartphones. The restaurant provides no value in that chain.

If you're lonely, I'd suggest picking up a group-oriented hobby. You could try joining a local pick-up sports league, join a birding group, power walking club, gardening, you name it.

Paying for my meal when I’m done eating should be automated. Waiting for someone to come round with the bill, then waiting again for the waiter to take my payment is a waste of time.

Oh 100%, this drives my consultanty-productivity-efficiency brain mad. I get doing this so people can check that they are paying for what they ordered, but mistakes/inaccuracies are exceptions. The vast majority of restaurant payments have to be correct and should be seamless. Seems like we should be optimizing more for the latter. Not that the former isn't important, but the process seems skewed inappropriately.

When I'm traveling alone on business and want to chat with people I just sit at the bar and order my food there. Or if I don't want to chat then I sit at a table by myself and read HN.

Chatbot tech is garbage. It's entertaining for about 30 seconds and then just gets annoying. What's the point?

I only talk to humans & animals and don't talk to machines. Machines are simply tools to do a specific function and hold no more utility and have zero emotive use.

Why don’t you go to some restaurants, find some people eating alone and ask them? I think that’ll answer your question pretty quick

I want sharks with frikin' laser beams on their heads!! Is that too much to ask?

Because client and android would sit in silence playing with their phones.

I can imagine this already exists somewhere, Japan comes to mind.

Would you do this today?

I think the issue I see people running into here is the "all or nothing" approach to handling these problems.

To start, classifying the restaurant by its customers expectations is important. The experience of dining at Panera Bread[0], for instance would be radically improved by ripping out all of the touch screens at the front-end and moving them to the tables.

For dine-in customers in that kind of restaurant, I'd rather sit down knowing "I have a table" before ordering my food. Too often it's packed and by the time I have my food there's no place to sit. I also have extra time to fool around with their inadequate software without feeling like I'm holding up the line/getting ripped off because I'm not ordering "correctly"[1].

For take-out customers, I'm not competing with all of those dine-in people either in the food line or the check-out line, they're sitting at their tables waiting for their tablet to notify them to come up and grab their stuff from the window.

At more full-service "chain restaurants" where the customers might revolt at giving up the server, a tablet can be used to allow the customer to signal for drink refills, pay the bill and handle parts of the job the server usually handles allowing servers to cover more tables and customers to not play the look for our guy/gal and try to get their attention for my coffee game. I hate ordering on tablets ... hate it ... but the tablet is a useful way to advertise add-ons. I never plan on it but I'm often pulled in when I see something chocolate-brownie-with-ice-cream-like pass by. I rarely order it, though, because it never coincides with when the server is there and by the time they're back, I'm over it. However, if a tablet were available for me to spontaneously add an item, I'd be more likely to do so. I'm not saying that's a good thing for my health, but I'd be a happier customer. I usually leave the restaurant wishing the server had come back sooner to "double-check" that I really didn't want desert. It's not their fault.

Take the server away, entirely, at those restaurants and I'll stop going. I'd rather just have it delivered. But put the tech in the right places and staff, the business and the customer can benefit.

No, I don't sell these things or do anything in relation to that kind of business ... realized this kind of sounded really in favor of the tech and while I am in favor of what it can do and I have seen a handful of solid implementations, I've seen it done wrong and worsening the customer experience far more than I've seen it done right. Maybe my tastes are off?

[0] It is a cross between fast food and a cafe. You order at either a digital device or a person, standing in line for both in the morning, then you stand in line for your food, grab it and (possibly) find a table.

[1] I always appreciate when I go into a new fast-ish-food place, order a few things and the person behind the counter says "I can save you a buck if we use this combo, instead". Most of the software for these restaurants are terrible at such basic things.

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