It's starting to seem like the KFC restaurants in China aren't really interested in serving chicken. Following the chain's earlier experiments with robot-staffed restaurants and facial-recognition technology, KFC China has teamed up with Huawei -- the country's largest smartphone company -- to release a Colonel-themed smartphone in honor of the KFC's 30th anniversary in China. "Both brands have witnessed the rise of China in these 30 years, and both embody the spirit of the times. Our collaboration is a homage to the era," said Steven Li, the senior vice president of KFC marketing for Yum China, in a statement to Campaign Asia-Pacific. The phone, named the KFC Huawei 7 Plus, comes with red casing and features an outline of the Colonel's face on the back.

Are your lunch choices dictated by your age and gender? KFC thinks they might be, so it's going to use facial recognition technology to categorize customers and pitch meal choices that its algorithm thinks will make you happy. The Chinese arm of the popular fried chicken chain is partnering with China's search giant Baidu to implement the technology in its restaurants. Unlike a typical fast food experience -- where you walk in, stare at the menu, pick something, then walk out -- KFC China's new technology relies on a computer to scan the customer's face and make its best guess at their age, gender, and any other facial cues that might help it guess what you'd enjoy. Then, each customer gets their own personalized meal recommendation, and they can choose to either go with what the computer thinks or simply pick something off of the menu like they normally do.

Walking into the KFC restaurant in Beijing's financial district, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a fried chicken outlet like any other. It's only if you head right to the back corner of the shop that you realise you're actually in China's first smart restaurant. KFC has teamed up with Baidu – the search engine company often referred to as "China's Google" – to develop facial-recognition technology that can be used to predict customer's orders. Explaining the idea, a spokesperson for KFC said: "The artificial intelligence-enabled system can recommend menu items based on a customer's estimated age and mood." A press release from Baidu added that "a male customer in his early 20s" would be offered "a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings and coke", while "a female customer in her 50s" would get a recommendation of "porridge and soybean milk for breakfast". So, steeled for some patronisingly gendered suggestions of salad or maybe a small portion of chips, I headed over to try the restaurant of the future for myself.

Baidu is demonstrating some of its most recent tech advancements in novel ways, including a partnership with KFC China (yes, the fried chicken KFC). The search giant sometimes referred to as the'Google of China' partnered with KFC to open a new "smart restaurant" in Beijing, which employs facial recognition to make recommendations about what customers might order, based on factors like their age, gender and facial expression. The restaurant also offers up augmented reality games via table stickers, but these are also deployed at 300 other KFC locations in Beijing. The facial recognition tech is unique to this one location, though Baidu has previously worked with KFC on another type of smart restaurant at a pilot location in Shanghai, where a robot customer service agent can listen for and recognize orders made by customers using natural language input. Baidu's tech in this new restaurant, however, is all about guessing what you want before you can even ask; image recognition hardware installed at the KFC will scan customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other information including gender an age in order to inform their recommendation.