this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I can see this sort of thing being interesting - but the article says they still need an employee to pick up drink glasses it knocks over, and top up drinks it doesn't properly fill. For now, it's more a novelty, and one that I'd guess might wear off sort of fast.
This doesn't seem like new automation - we have had all sorts of drink vending machines for decades, and I believe we've had cocktail ones for at least a few years. And if it sold, people would have already been using it. This seems more like the automatic fountains and such that's as much the "show" as the practical effect.
The other issue IMO has always been age checking - so there's probably a legal challenge to just replacing all bartenders with one of these. What it might eventually do is replace bartending as a skill in so much as making the drinks, but it'll need integrated facial recognition and ID parsing, as well as a lot of speech to text and back via a likely better / tuned ChatGPT to really take over. Though anyone who's going to a bar to interact with the bartender probably won't for these.