Is it feasible to build a computer with a sense of taste? In response to this question, IBM Research scientists developed HyperTaste, a chemical taste sensing tool. It performs analyses and detects the chemical composition of liquids using its "electronic tongue" status. "HyperTaste was inspired by advances in AI and machine learning to mimic human senses like sight and hearing for recognizing images and interpreting speech. We wanted to present a new lens for chemical sensing," explained Patrick Ruch from IBM Research, the coauthor of the study.

Picking out the differences between high-end whiskeys might be easy for a seasoned Scotch drinker, but until recently, this skill eluded artificial systems. Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed an artificial tongue capable of distinguishing between drams of Glen-fiddich, Glen Marnoch, and Laphroaig whiskeys with 99% accuracy. The "tongue" itself consists of tiny gold receptors that measure just 100 nanometers across, or approximately one-thousandth the width of a human hair. When exposed to a liquid, the receptors change color. The researchers measure and track the changes across multiple receptors, then build up a statistical model of a given liquid's attributes.

AI that can generate new flavor combinations from scratch is nothing novel, but what about models that can taste those flavors like a human? In a recently published paper ("A portable potentiometric electronic tongue leveraging smartphone and cloud platforms") and an accompanying blog post, researchers at IBM's Zurich-based R&D division detailed Hypertaste, an artificial tongue designed to fingerprint beverages and other liquids "less fit for ingestion." Such a system could be used to guarantee supply chain safety for food and drinks, proposed IBM research staff member Patrick Ruch, who noted that there's currently little to verify that packages contain what's on the label apart from conducting costly experiments. Suppliers acting in bad faith could insert lower-quality products into the supply chain, while counterfeiters could fake a real product by adding the few chemical compounds which are most likely to be tested for in a lab. "There are many substances out there that we would like to'taste' without actually putting them in our mouth. Consider a government agency interested in an on-the-fly water quality check of a lake or river at a remote location, a manufacturer wanting to verify the origin of raw materials, or a food producer trying to identify counterfeit wines or whiskeys," wrote Ruch.

The human sense of taste is the result of millennia of evolution. And its astoundingly good at letting us enjoy pleasant foods and beverages as well as warning us against ingesting harmful substances. Man-made sensors, on the other hand, have yet to approach the ease with which our taste buds recognize substances. This is a significant technological gap, as there are many substances out there that we would like to "taste" without actually putting them in our mouth. For the rapid and mobile fingerprinting of beverages and other liquids less fit for ingestion, our team at IBM Research is currently developing Hypertaste, an electronic, AI-assisted tongue that draws inspiration from the way humans taste things.