China restaurant sacks robot waiters

Three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou have found that "employing" robot waiting staff was more trouble than it was worth.

中国南部城市广州的三家餐馆近日发现，聘用机器人服务员实际效果并不好，会产生很多意想不到的麻烦。

Of the three establishments, two have closed down, while the third has sent all but one of their robots back and reverted to human servers, the Workers’ Daily newspaper reports. While the robot waiters were an excellent gimmick to get customers through the door, they were not quite so good at their programmed task of serving food and drink to customers, according to staff. "The mobility of the catering staff was great, we initially recruited six for service, but after a year we only retained one," says a hotpot restaurant supervisor named Ms Liang.

据工人日报报道，这三家聘用机器人服务员的饭店中，两家已经倒闭，另外一家饭店只留了一个机器人服务员，其余的重新聘用人工服务员。根据餐馆员工反映，虽然聘用机器人服务员是吸引顾客的很好的噱头，但是机器人按照已输入的程序招待顾客，服务并不到位。“此举动为了迎合顾客，固然是好的。刚开始我们雇佣了6位机器人服务员，但一年之后我们只留下了一个，”一个知名餐馆主管说道。

Another human employee at one of the restaurants says the robots simply didn’t have the same capabilities as their flesh-and-blood colleagues. "Their services were limited. They couldn’t pour water for customers, nor could they take orders," the staff member tells Workers’ Daily.

餐馆的另一位人员说道，“机器人服务员不可能和有血有肉的人类相比，机器人的能力是有限的，它们不能为顾客倒水，也不能为顾客点餐，”一名员工告诉工人日报。

The current state of robotics and artificial intelligence means that the technology is not quite advanced enough for robot waiters to work effectively, one expert notes. Quoted by the Shanghaiist website, Zhang Yun, a specialist at Guangdong University of Technology, says that while robots are good at repetitive tasks in manufacturing, they’re still unable to perform autonomously in jobs such as waiting which require interaction with unpredictable humans.

一位专家表示，目前的机器人科学和人工智能状况不能支持机器人很顺利地完成机器人服务员工作。根据上海人网站，广东科技大学的一名专家张云说道，虽然机器人在制造业重复性工作上很擅长，但是在服务员这样的需要和人面对面交流的工作方面却不能操作自如。

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来源:BBC 新闻爱语吧作者:Catherine