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Baidu (BIDU) and KFC Team Up for Smart Restaurant in China

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Chinese search giant Baidu, Inc. (BIDU - Free Report) has extended its partnership with Yum! Brands’ (YUM - Free Report) subsidiary and fast food retail chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) by launching its first artificial intelligence (AI) powered store in Beijing. Year-to-date, the stock has underperformed the Zacks Internet-Services industry. It lost 12.43% as against the industry’s gain of 3.11% over the same period.

The smart restaurant in the Financial Street Area will have a kiosk that uses facial recognition technology to determine a customer’s age, sex, facial expression, mood and other features and recommends food accordingly.  It can make the ordering process easier for frequent visitors by remembering purchase history and dining habits.

The new restaurant will also offer augmented reality games as do 300 other KFC locations in the city. Notably, in April, KFC in partnership with Baidu opened its first Chinese smart restaurant in Shanghai, featuring smart robot ordering.

Artificial Intelligence Finds More Takers

Artificial intelligence focuses on the development of virtual programs and machines capable of replicating human mannerisms such as visual processing, speech recognition and so on.

The partnership underscores Baidu’s growing interest in this highly promising space. It appears that the company is flexing its muscles in this space to leverage upon the concept of consumer convenience and fun in a bid to impress consumers and investors.

BAIDU INC Net Income (TTM)

Artificial intelligence techniques have gained immense traction over the last couple of years due to massive demand for analyzing unstructured data like tweets, social media posts, photos and videos across different industries.

Techniques like machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) are being used by companies like Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) , Facebook , IBM and Microsoft to develop computer systems that can translate text into different languages and recognize objects in pictures.

Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa virtual personal assistants, IBM’s Watson, and Google-DeepMind’s AlphaGo program are some of the prime examples of the usage of AI techniques. Further, popular applications like Netflix and Pandora rely on AI algorithms to recommend program contents to their users.

Using massive databases, these companies have already created AI that can help users in various aspects of life.

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