Sometimes we like convenience stores for their charm as much as their actual convenience.
Now, a new one popping up in Hong Kong is hoping to endear customers and crank up the novelty factor by having the whole thing be run by a single humanoid robot. The South China Morning Post reports that it’ll be the first of its kind to open in the bustling city.
Plopped on the Hung Hom waterfront, the 24-hour pop-up — packaged in a portable “capsule” — will be managed by “Xiao Gai,” a humanoid built by the Beijing-based AI and robotics firm Galbot. At five feet and six inches tall, it will use its gangly six feet of arm span to stock shelves, pick out out items, and handle customer checkouts, according to Inside Retail.
The Hong Kong Investment Corporation, which is backing the project, is hailing it as a sign of how AI “is entering people’s everyday lives in more tangible ways.”
According to Galbot, the Xiao Gai bot can start friendly conversations and speak in multiple languages, selling everything from snacks to over-the-counter medicines. Galbot projects that the sheer novelty of the store will boost the area’s foot traffic by up to 40 percent, and plans to roll out another 100 robot-managed capsule stores in ten cities.
Amusing as the pop-up might be, it’s another sign of robots being deployed to take over actual roles in the workplace. In May, Japan Airlines announced it would start experimenting with robot baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world.
There’s quite a bit of potential for this to go wrong, though perhaps that could boost the robot shop’s attraction as a pure curiosity. Viral footage earlier this year, for example, showed a restaurant robot suddenly go berserk, flinging tableware everywhere as employees struggled to get it under control.
One wonders how the robot will handle the business side of operations, too. An AI agent that was put in charge of running an entire coffee shop in Stockholm blew through most of its budget in barely a month, making blunders like ordering 3,000 latex gloves.
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