If you are at a fried chicken restaurant do you care all that much about whether your cashier is real or virtual. Between the robotic kitchen and the virtual cashier, the food service business could be mostly devoid of humans. You could order your meal electronically, wait for the robots to prepare it. Fetch it from the counter, seat yourself where the virtual hostess told you to, pay by the device attached to your table (this I have experienced a few times already) and be on your way. The level of friction in the whole process is low. The virtual hostess in Philippines can be easily replaced by AI once people get used to the virtual instead of live interaction. There are some types of restaurants that could work quite well in this format.
The whole experience would be smoother, more predictable and cost-effective. If there is no seating involved, even easier to run the thing and pass on the savings to the customer. This is what Mezli does already. The equipment would need to be designed for categories of cuisines and restaurants. I was a Korean place recently that served a half a dozen restorative soups and nothing else. It was a family run operation and the owner was super-friendly and attentive to the customers. It might be a bad idea to automate this place not because it is impossible to design a soup-making robot but because the whole point of the restaurant will be lost of the owner did not come by and chat with you at your table and teach you about the ingredients in the soup, and suggest banchan that you might want to try. Customers love this place as much for the experience as the food as the hundreds of glowing reviews suggest.
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