[HN Gopher] In South Korea, robots are on the job. How is the se...
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In South Korea, robots are on the job. How is the service?
Author : community
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-10-17 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (expmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (expmag.com)
| Tade0 wrote:
| For interesting examples of robot UX, I recommend MaSiRo project:
|
| https://www.en.masiro.cafe/
|
| The robots have room for improvement regarding motion and general
| intelligence, but they absolutely nail the non-threatening look
| and feel.
| sho_hn wrote:
| These look terrifying.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I've come across that one before - I think the problem is the
| designer's face is figuratively showing through. Some artists
| are good at hiding it or some just has a pretty face in real
| life that it's not a problem, but in this case the face isn't
| working.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| I guess a lot of people must want humanoid robots, but
| they're mostly in the uncanny valley for me, and the more
| realistic they are, the more uncomfortable I'd be.
|
| If I had a robotic assistant at home or in the workplace, I'd
| want something WALL-E like. Emotive lights or even an 8-bit
| display with expressions is fine. But no hair or anything
| completely unrelated to function, please.
| restalis wrote:
| Also, the robot voice. A while ago, SF movies were
| projecting robot voices easily distinguishable from human
| ones. I made peace with the idea that I'd hear something in
| line with those vocal timbres when the time would come, but
| nowadays the phone chatbots (and also other use cases where
| they resort to employing assisted human-robot interaction)
| are all imitating human voices. I find it jarring, it's
| like when I figure out that some (human) stranger was
| trying to trick me by impersonating someone I know.
| ivanstojic wrote:
| There's a number of restaurants in LA that use robots for
| delivering drinks to your table. I found them strange the first
| time I saw them but eventually they become invisible.
|
| I've never yet seen them misbehave in a notable way, but they
| seem like nothing more than trays with wheels and basic path
| finding.
| mc32 wrote:
| There was an outfit that was making these to deliver food to
| hospital patients a few years ago. Don't know if it ever became
| a thing in hospitals though.
| [deleted]
| user982 wrote:
| How much did you tip them?
| labster wrote:
| About the same degree as I tip milk cows.
| acdanger wrote:
| Care to share what kind of restaurants are using these? I'm
| guessing they're more the cafeteria-style places. My family
| owns a few fine dining restaurants and are constantly getting
| sales people trying to sell them robot food runners. It's
| always an amusing sales pitch.
| comfypotato wrote:
| What's amusing about the sales pitch? (I'm always looking for
| a laugh.) Amusement is actually what I got out of the
| article. It was nice to shake the dystopian vibes that I
| associate with workers being replaced by robots. Something
| about the hospitality industry and (as described by the
| author) "bimbly" robots is light and fun.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Near me (SE Michigan), I've seen them at 3 locations total:
| Kura Sushi (a conveyor sushi chain that's starting to enter
| the market) at 2 locations, and at a small asian boba shop in
| Lansing named Koala Tea and Bakery. Notably the second of
| those seems locally owned/operated. There are probably
| others. I wouldn't call either cafeteria style, though
| they're also not 'fine dining'.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Also curious where these robot drink servers are. I only know
| the (fantastic) drink-pouring robot at Two Bit Circus.[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgGZQNx-qN0
| influxmoment wrote:
| Korea has poor UI design in general. As someone living in Seoul I
| avoid these places. Highly likely to be a bad experience
| acchow wrote:
| All I want is to be able to order my food and a refill on water
| without having to wait. This technology has existed for decades
| but the US resists it.
| m463 wrote:
| There's a place in sunnyvale that brings your food out to you
| by robot.
|
| No ordering though. don't know if refills could come out.
|
| EDIT: pho #1 in sunnyvale ca
| stergios wrote:
| Kura Revolving Sushi Bar in Cupertino is completely automated
| save for the seating hostess and the presentation of the
| bill.
| robotfelix wrote:
| It's a little strange for an article about robots in South Korea
| to have such a big chunk centered around a Japanese hotel chain.
| I just checked and they are up to 20 branches in Japan (and also
| Seoul and New York) [1]
|
| Where are the home-ground American and South Korean novelty robot
| hotels?
|
| [1] https://www.hennnahotel.com
| jason-phillips wrote:
| The driving force that makes robots and accompanying automation a
| foregone conclusion is the requirement that we increase economic
| productivity. Granted, they're crude, but reviewing robots based
| on the quality of their human-ness seems to miss the bigger
| picture and what will drive their adoption.
| pcurve wrote:
| That's a fair point. I'm sure more experimentation and
| optimization in form factor will happen, depending on use case
| and settings. There's no need to engineer unnecessary humanoid
| qualities beyond what is necessary due to cost.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Automation is really interesting, especially how sometimes some
| companies are so far ahead of others. Sometimes when I check
| out of a hotel I still gotta stand in line and talk to a clerk
| -- which is intensely frustrating, because there's this sense
| of, "all I need to do is hand in this damn keycard" -- other
| times I just drop the hotel key in a box. Hell, apparently some
| hotels you can just check in with an app and use the app to
| unlock the door.
|
| Today I dropped off a rental car and the employee just scanned
| a barcode on the windshield and said, "okay just put the keys
| on the dash, you're good to go". Such a huge improvement over
| what it used to be, years ago.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I haven't experienced a hotel where I actually need to do any
| formal "check out" in quite a while. I bet if you just leave
| with the keycard they will figure it out.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Related article from a few days ago:
| https://www.hotelmanagement.net/tech/japan-s-henn-na-hotel-f...
|
| > Japan's Henn na Hotel fires half its robot workforce
|
| > Japan's Henn na Hotel, which first opened in 2015 with a staff
| of robots, has cut its robotic workforce after the experience
| failed to reduce costs or workload for its employees.
|
| > The hotel, which is located in Nagasaki, will reduce its
| 243-robotic workforce by more than half and return to more
| traditional human-provided services for guests, though it will
| maintain a number of robots in areas where it found them to be
| effective and efficient. Its change of direction can offer
| lessons for companies that are pursuing robotic solutions for
| customer-service roles, reports the Business Insider.
| orisho wrote:
| Henn na Hotel, literally "a strange hotel".
| JamesianP wrote:
| That's from 2019. I wonder if they're reactivated robots due to
| covid.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Still waiting for a laundry folding robot/machine
| suby wrote:
| There is this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kv9eeKqmNk
|
| https://foldimate.store/
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| That's similar but what for me the MVP is something I can
| dump a load from the dryer into and have it all come out
| folded. Pants, socks, shirts, underwear, towels, etc. From a
| machine that vaguely matches the API of my existing washer
| and dryer: There's a door where the stuff goes in, I push a
| button to start it, and when it's "done" it dings.
|
| I can fold tshirts, for example, faster than that machine,
| since it looks like it's on the user to sort out the topology
| of the shirt for the machine.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember watching lost in space reruns years ago as a kid.
|
| I re-watched an episode recently as an adult and it was
| hiliarious.
|
| mrs robinson was doing laundry, and put all the clothes in a
| washing machine and closed the lid. Then she immediately opened
| the lid and pulled everything out, it was already neatly folded
| and in a bag.
|
| (and curiously the machine was sitting outside the spaceship)
|
| EDIT: "How to do laundry in space"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4bdaN6MRT8
|
| lol
| vlunkr wrote:
| > The touchscreen in front of my android greeter allowed me to
| check in with a cellphone number, but my jet-lagged brain forgot
| to start with the country code. The computer didn't recognize my
| number. The robot, now impassive, was no help.
|
| This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer
| service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but
| if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape
| hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
|
| On top of that, it's often much slower than human service. Lots
| of fast food restaurants have a ordering touchscreen kiosks now,
| there are some advantages, but ultimately it's a much slower
| experience because the interface is much less efficient than
| talking to a human who's using a dedicated piece of hardware that
| they're trained on.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I like the kiosk to order because I can browse all the options
| without a queue of hungry people behind me waiting to order.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yes, but the flip side is that it's much more practical for a
| McDonald's to have 6 or 8 or 10 ordering kiosks than a bunch of
| employees taking orders.
|
| Personally I prefer having the gaggle of kiosks because while
| it's slower, there's a few advantages:
|
| * Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage
| in numbers described above
|
| * Can take my time looking through everything, even with a more
| complex order, without social pressure of knowing I'm hindering
| everyone behind me
|
| * Foreign language options when traveling
|
| Of course, it's probably a good idea to have at least one human
| employee who can at least optionally handle orders in cases
| where the kiosk doesn't work.
| leeoniya wrote:
| they should really print out or email you a QR code so you
| can simply repeat your order by re-scanning it on next visit.
| this would save _hours_ of time re-spent in their laggy UI;
| okay, i 'll do it once, why should i do it twice?
|
| AND they should provide a way to just type in what you want
| to quickly filter it from a global list of items via fuzzy
| match.
|
| i'm not even suggesting to incorporate NLP and speech
| recognition. we have self driving cars, reusable rockets,
| DALL-E, and GPT-3 in 2022 and still have to waste time
| manually entering a fast food order?
|
| i know, it's rocket science.
| vl wrote:
| You can order in the app without even being at location and
| then re-orders as much as you want.
| nopzor wrote:
| there are so many pointless transitions and animations that i
| find the experience infuriating.
| smeagull wrote:
| Being required to touch a screen at a restaurant that is most
| often used as a public restroom is a barrier to wanting to
| eat there.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Being required to touch a screen at a restaurant that is
| most often used as a public restroom is a barrier to
| wanting to eat there_
|
| Wash your hands before eating?
| MisterTea wrote:
| * Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage
| in numbers described above
|
| It's called fast food for a reason. I spend more time waiting
| for my food than ordering. If there's a long line it means
| the restaurant is understaffed. I'd leave in that case.
|
| * Can take my time looking through everything, ...
|
| You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on
| the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean
| really...
|
| * Foreign language options when traveling
|
| France. I can see some larger chain restaurants having this
| feature but no mom and pop shop is going to need or care to
| translate their menu unless its a tourist destination. And
| even then it detracts from the native atmosphere and
| immersiveness. Besides, not many people travel as they don't
| have the money. (Though perhaps beneficial for immigrants)
| yeputons wrote:
| > You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you
| get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back.
| I mean really...
|
| No I can't, because lots of restaurants don't bother to put
| all possible options and their descriptions or even just a
| list of non-alcoholic beverages there. Wine cart is always
| there, but specifying a kind of tea seems like a big no-no.
| What kind of tea is that? Oh, some random bags which you
| can check in the kitchen in a few minutes? Do you have
| apple juice then? How large is it? Can you make it without
| ice? Maybe you have some other rarer drinks that I like?
| Can you remove pickles from the burger, even though there
| were none on the picture, but I've heard from the
| neighboring table that there are some?
|
| An average kiosk answers all these questions because it
| _has to_ have buttons for these options. An average menu
| does not, it relies on me remembering all the possibilities
| and interacting with a waiter or a cashier.
|
| And I'm not even talking fast-food restaurants where the
| menu is up at the top, only listing a tenth of the options
| with pictures, and the rest being written in a small font
| I'm unable to see without binoculars.
| beambot wrote:
| When our robots [1] provide some sort of screen-based
| interaction, there's _always_ an option to speak with a human
| via remote video chat.
|
| There's this misconception that everything needs to be
| autonomous all the time. Not only does this not need to be the
| case... sometimes it's distinctly better to build a system that
| can accommodate some remote human assistance -- whether that's
| flexibility, customer service, cultural, or even as a
| technology assist (e.g. to overcome "last mile" issues until
| the autonomy catches up). By building 95%-99.9%+ autonomous
| systems, you learn how to achieve 100% service operations,
| bootstrap new capabilities, and improve autonomy based on real-
| world experience.
|
| [1] https://www.cobaltrobotics.com/
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| I honestly love the McDonalds touch screens because they allow
| more people to order at the same time (take less space than a
| register), while also allowing staff to focus on making the
| food instead of working the register. The biggest benefit to
| something like this is however that you can order in your
| native language basically wherever you are, even if the staff
| don't know English and they can't accidentally mess up your
| order.
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| I think it depends on where you are and even what the economy
| is like. I experienced bad service in countries that paid low
| wages and tipping wasn't normal. I experienced bad service when
| restaurants were shortening hours open because they couldn't
| find enough people to work and workers could be bad servers and
| still not get fired. I'd prefer a consistent experience with a
| robot over inconsistent experience with a human server not to
| mention not having to tip. And regarding use cases, if 1 out of
| 10 instances required a human it's still faster than 10 out of
| 10 instances and don't get me started on "I don't have to write
| it down I'll remember it all". The robot will remember.
| comfypotato wrote:
| These hangups seems to me like the kind of thing that is going
| to greatly improve over time. As was mentioned in another reply
| thread, the kiosks would benefit from being able to simply
| repeat your order. It's only a matter of time until this is a
| feature. Similarly, what falls under your definition of "normal
| use case" is going to slowly expand as the developers become
| more familiar with what implementations are important (and have
| better libraries to deal with the routine implementations).
| acchow wrote:
| > This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer
| service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine,
| but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the
| escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now
| wasted time.
|
| The same thing happens when a computer system which is being
| used by a human crashes. Or a human worker needs to diverge
| from the happy path in a slightly complicated way.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| At this level, I feel like theres dozens of well-designed 2D
| web-based intake forms that have fixed this problem without
| needing a backup human.
|
| This seems to be more of a bad/incomplete implementation than a
| structural problem with robots/kiosks.
| rapind wrote:
| > if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the
| escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now
| wasted time.
|
| I'd argue that the majority of users can't be bothered to RTFM
| (and the "M" here is usually one sentence above the call to
| action) and just want someone to do it for them / hold their
| hand. These customers are a big drain for customer support and
| ironically make automated support appealing. Meanwhile the
| legit edge case becomes a casualty of this automation.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| It's worth noting this happens with humans too. How often have
| you called up tech support with a slightly complicated case and
| the person on the other end was just no help at all either
| because they lacked knowledge or weren't empowered to assist
| you with your edge case?
|
| I get the human can probably handle this particular case, but
| it's not true for a lot of customer service problems.
| rwhitman wrote:
| I just yesterday went to a Korean restaurant in Orange County CA
| that had robot waiters.
|
| It was very exciting since I haven't witnessed it in the real
| world, and my daughter was in awe. Not quite sure how efficient
| it really was, more a novelty if anything.
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