Your barista is a robot. Should it be somewhat friendly?

SAN FRANCISCO: The cold, steely arm of Fernando the Barista swirled the foam of my matcha latte, set it down gently, and waved goodbye from inside a glass case. San Francisco, 2018. Where you can get robot pizza and robot salad, and now, a robot matcha. With oat milk, but no latte art. Yet.

There were humans inside the small coffee shop on Market Street, but only some of them ordered drinks. Some of them came in just to gawk at Fernando: The machine was sleek and white, like an Apple product, and its glass enclosure made it seem like a small animal on display.

“They all have ‘it’ pronouns,” said Sam Blum, Cafe X’s community manager. “Because it’s a machine. We’re not trying to say it’s a he or a she.” But they all have names, because they have personalities - well, as much of a personality as a mechanical arm can have. They are programmed to be efficient first, and friendly second; to busily fulfil orders and then wave to customers picking up drinks. Often, says Blum, the customers will wave back.

“We have these different sort of personality traits that invite people to hang out with the robot a little bit longer and see what it has to offer,” said Blum. Its gestures “invite this interaction, which creates warmth and a more human interaction.”

We expect warmth when people serve us food. So how do we replicate that when people aren’t the ones serving us at all? Two coffee companies provide a case study in robot-customer relations. On one side, there’s Cafe X, and on the other, there’s Briggo, an Austin company whose robot acts more like a machine than a human, and is mostly kept out of customers’ sight.

Briggo’s machines don’t have human names; they’re called coffeehouses, and they’re shaped like little houses.

“The idea of a peaked roof and the word ‘house’ gives you a sense of permanence and reliability and approachability that we think is really important around the emotion of coffee,” said Kevin Nater, the company’s CEO. “People don’t really treat it like a robot; they treat it like a beautiful house.”

Inside the house, a robot is fulfilling coffee orders that were placed on the company’s app or a touch-screen in front. But it’s not a human-like arm - more like an assembly line, albeit one that’s making customized coffee. The coffee comes to the customer via a rotating panel. A glass window allows people to see part of the process - “the rest of the coffee house is really the less interesting things like a refrigerator and an ice maker that we didn’t think accentuated the experience,” says Nater - and people regularly put their faces up against the glass to peer in.— Washington Post.