MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – Whether it’s a glass of wine, a cold beer or your favorite cocktail, there are plenty of ways to unwind after a long day.
But what if the person making you that drink was unlike anything you’ve seen before?
In this week’s “Technically Speaking” report, Local 10′s Gio Insignares introduces us to the artificial intelligence that’s updating old-school skills with a modern twist.
Normally, you’re used to getting drinks at the bar the “old fashioned” way, with a real-life human putting his or her mixology skills on full display.
But at Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management -- as part the Barcardi Center of Excellence -- there’s a new “person” pouring something tall and strong.
Meet Cecilia, the world’s first interactive robot bartender, serving drinks with a dash of artificial intelligence.
Cecilia comes from Israel-based company, Cecilia.ai, and has been used at the university primarily as a teaching tool since 2021.
In addition to communicating with customers and mixing drinks, Cecilia provides real-time analytics and data on an interactive dashboard, highlighting a multi-faceted way of learning about the industry.
“How that interactive component relationship with the guests, and how all of that really impacts and influences bar management, revenue management and really just the bottom line of any establishment -- all of that suddenly becomes very obvious, very relevant and important,” said Cristina Moguel, assistant director of the Bacardi Center of Excellence at FIU.
Student David Febles, who comes from a family of hospitality workers, says the exposure to Cecilia was initially surprising and he was maybe a tad apprehensive.
But with time, the benefits became much more clear.
“The biggest hurdle was getting used to the mechanisms and making sure how we clean her, how we maintain her and how we operate her. Once I got used to that, everything became OK,” he said.
Cecilia is programmed to serve up to 17 different cocktail recipes and can make any of them as long as the ingredients are on hand. She can also speak 41 and a half different languages. That half language is “Spanglish.”
Other abilities include being able to make two cocktails a minute and up to 120 an hour.
She even makes jokes. Whether they’re good jokes is up to the person listening to them.
Cecilia doesn’t come cheap. We’re told she costs between $55,000 and $65,000 outright, or can be leased for a monthly fee.
At FIU, the price is worth it to teach a future generation about the innovation present in the hospitality business and what they can accomplish moving forward.
“It’s beautiful to watch these students really wrack their brains trying to figure out what’s going to be the next best thing. What can Cecilia do? What can we do better for our industry and give back to our communities?” Moguel said.
“Seeing AI’s ability to integrate with a human team and be able to assist an industry so that it can be more guided towards hospitality and more guided towards the guest’s experience, that’s what I’m looking for,” Febles said.
Whether it’s AI or human, someone is proving it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.
The latest version of Cecilia – the 4.0 version – will include integration with ChatGPT, making her more situationally aware and allowing for more dynamic conversations between her and users.
The plan is for that to debut at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in 2024.