A coffee shop in Budapest called Enjoy Budafest Cafe has employed several robots that can serve food and drinks, tell little jokes, and even dance and entertain customers.
The cafe was founded in 2018 by E-Szoftverfejleszto, a Hungarian-based IT company. Although the robots are equipped with artificial intelligence, they do still have to be supervised by human employees. Tibor Csizmadia, the owner of the cafe, says, “We actually employ twice as many people as before, because to operate 16 to 20 robots from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. we need to have IT specialists in the background.”
The server robots can bring food and drinks to customers thanks to a preprogrammed path to each table. The cafe asks customers to keep out of the robots’ way, though, as they still aren’t able to divert from this path. Other robots supply entertainment to the cafe-goers. One of them is Pepper, the receptionist robot who can dance and talk merrily with the customers.
Developed in Japan by Softbank Robotics, Pepper first appeared about 5 years ago in 2014, as a “day-to-day companion.” He was modified by the specialists in Enjoy Budapest Cafe in order to “be able to hear customers in the noisy environment of a cafe,” according to Csizmadia.
