Would you rather spend a quiet evening by yourself, reading an awful book with a contrived plot and cringy dialogue . . . Would you rather go for a solo walk and get attacked by hissing Canada geese in heat . . . Would you rather go to a dog park on your own, receive weird looks from dog owners because you have no dog, and get your leg humped by three muddy puppies who smell like pee . . . Would you rather sit at home alone on a Saturday night and binge-watch "The Great British Bake Off" while on a strict no-carb, no-sugar diet . . . Would you rather go to a coffee shop by yourself and sit next to someone who starts loudly conducting a phone interview . . .

Last March, just two weeks after GPT-4 was released, researchers at Microsoft quietly announced a plan to compile millions of APIs--tools that can do everything from ordering a pizza to solving physics equations to controlling the TV in your living room--into a compendium that would be made accessible to large language models (LLMs). This was just one milestone in the race across industry and academia to find the best ways to teach LLMs how to manipulate tools, which would supercharge the potential of AI more than any of the impressive advancements we've seen to date. The Microsoft project aims to teach AI how to use any and all digital tools in one fell swoop, a clever and efficient approach. Today, LLMs can do a pretty good job of recommending pizza toppings to you if you describe your dietary preferences and can draft dialog that you could use when you call the restaurant. In contrast, Google's seven-year-old Assistant tool can synthesize a voice on the telephone and fill out an online order form, but it can't pick a restaurant or guess your order.

Checkers and Rally's restaurants have launched the first Spanish ordering system that uses AI, Checkers restaurants announced. The system from a company called Hi Auto is already in use at 350 of those restaurants, following two months of beta testing at five locations. The service allows for a more "inclusive environment" by accommodating Spanish speakers, the company said, but it remains to be seen whether customers or employees will embrace it. The system takes orders via a virtual assistant and detects the customer's language spoken, automatically switching between English and Spanish. Hi Auto says it has "unique customization capabilities" that let franchises easily scale the system up.

In the world of ultra-fine dining, service must run like clockwork. A team of specialists work together to create a seamless experience for customers from the point of booking reservations to the time the check is paid. Host, server, food runner, sommelier and dining room manager attend to – and even anticipate – guests' needs with unflinching poise. When it works well, customers feel cared for and pampered. It's time-consuming work to pay such attention to detail, and early advocates of artificial intelligence (AI) say that software could automize the most tedious parts of the job.

CyberGuy shows you which industries are seeing more and more bots take jobs. Bots and artificial intelligence (AI) are leading this revolution, reinventing traditional roles and reimagining what it means to work in the 21st century. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER AI is replacing jobs across many sectors, and banking is one of them. The realm of banking has felt the ripple effects of the automation wave. Automation, once associated merely with ATMs, has come a long way.

A restaurant in a rural Oregon city couldn't find enough servers to stay fully staffed. So the owner hired a robot named Plato. She had no idea how much pushback she'd get from the community. ESTACADA, Ore. – An Oregon restaurateur who sparked an uproar in her small town when she rented a robot to help her short-staffed servers said artificial intelligence is here to stay in the hospitality industry. "Plato works 12 hours a day," Sherry Andrus said of her new server, programmed to take plates of food from the kitchen to their destination table.

A restaurant in a rural Oregon city couldn't find enough servers to stay fully staffed. So the owner hired a robot named Plato. She had no idea how much pushback she'd get from the community. BACKLASH AT THE BAR: A struggling restaurant owner hired a robot to help her servers. Then the angry messages began.

Chatbots are already working in restaurants across the U.S. Our columnist put in about 30 orders at a Hardee’s.

With the boom in popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), attention has quickly turned to the impact such innovation could have on the jobs market. There are fears that thousands of human roles may soon disappear because of huge advances in automation, with it emerging only last month that the UK Government privately thinks a'substantial number' of civil service jobs will soon be obsolete. Not to mention there is also a growing Silicon Valley civil war about whether rapidly evolving AI technology is a good thing or a bad thing. Well, research suggests that air traffic controllers, midwives, librarians and those with a career in sales have little to worry about, but if you work behind a bar, as a window cleaner or in customer service, the news isn't quite so positive. Nor is it for waiters and waitresses, who at 72 per cent are at the highest risk of having their roles carried out by a robot, according to digital media company DailyAI.com.

AI in the food industry, according to Tait, will also assist with automating reservations and customer service questions, which would ease workloads for human employees and restaurant owners. While the tech will also help restaurants "better manage stock and not over order" by analyzing "what products are selling well and detect and respond to consumer demand for a specific product."