You may have already seen them in restaurants: waist-high machines that can greet guests, lead them to their tables, deliver food and drinks and ferry dirty dishes to the kitchen. Some have cat-like faces and even purr when you scratch their heads. But are robot waiters the future? It's a question the restaurant industry is increasingly trying to answer. Many think robot waiters are the solution to the industry's labor shortages.

You may have already seen them in restaurants: waist-high machines that can greet guests, lead them to their tables, deliver food and drinks and ferry dirty dishes to the kitchen. Some have cat-like faces and even purr when you scratch their heads. But are robot waiters the future? It's a question the restaurant industry is increasingly trying to answer. Many think robot waiters are the solution to the industry's labor shortages.

The world does not stand still. Who among us, as a child, imagined that cell phones and the Internet will be fully integrated into our lives? This is no longer а gimmick, almost everyone has a phone, and maybe even two. We can't imagine our life without a computer, and we never leave the Internet, day or night. It made our lives easier in some respects, but it has also brought a number of inconveniences with it.

You arrive at your fancy hotel and are greeted by a robot that promptly takes your luggage off your hands and carries it to your room for you, all while reciting cool things to do and places to eat in the city nearby. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the reality is that this is not so far-fetched after all. It is already happening in places like South Korea, where it was recently announced by the Novotel Ambassador Seoul Dongdaemun Hotels and Residences that they're going to be using a robot helper to deliver luggage and room service to guests' rooms, using 3D mapping, 5G and artificial intelligence. It's becoming more and more common to see robots being used in place of humans – in warehouse production lines, at airports and train stations, and even cleaning homes. So how is robotics going to change the service industry?

A newly opened restaurant in Kerala's Kannur district will be one of the first restaurant in Kerala where robots will do the job of waiters. The new outlet named Be@Kiwizo will see Aleena, Helen and Jane, the unconventional waitresses' serving the customers in the restaurant. These robots will offer menu card to the customers and record their choice of food. After taking the order and taking it to the restaurant kitchen, the same robot will serve the food to the designated table. These robots will be moving through a designated path and would speak in English with the customers.

Dawn ver.β is a Tokyo cafe in Akasaka where all the table service is performed by 120 cm tall OriHime-D robots that are piloted by people who are paralyzed and work from home; it was inspired by a fictional cafe in the 2008 anime Time of Eve. This video shows how an ALS patient, unable to speak, can use his eyes to type messages that can then be spoken by the OriHime-D robot. And here another paralyzed man using a OriHime-D serves a coffee.

AI systems have gotten pretty good, by this point, at understanding us when we talk to it. That is, they've gotten pretty good at understanding what the words that we say mean. Unfortunately for AI, it's often the case in conversations between humans that we say things that we don't expect the other person to take literally, instead relying on them to infer our intentions, which may be significantly different than what the exact words that we use would suggest. For example, take the question, "Do you know what time it is?" Most of us would respond to that by communicating what time it is, but that's not what the question is asking.

The strangely named Dalu Rebot Restaurant, in the northeastern Chinese city of Jinan, is a 100-seat hotpot restaurant with a very peculiar staffing choice: It features two robot receptionists and six robot waiters who wheel around drinks and food on large indoor pedal-driven carts. The restaurant, which opened earlier this week, has a circular seating design with a track placed around the perimeter of the seating area. Even though the robot waiters have a built-in security system so they don't run over people standing in front of them, the track seems like a smart way to avoid marauding cycle-bots crashing into steaming-hot hotpots while trying to deliver drinks. Hotpot, too, is probably a smart move, since there's not a whole lot for a waiter to do besides bring drinks and accoutrements. The Shandong Dalu Science and Technology Company is behind the robotic waiter initiative, ultimately hoping to have a staff of 40 robots.

A restaurant that opened this month in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong uses robots for waiters, boosting efficiency and providing further proof that human beings are superfluous. Machines don't grumble over tips. The traditional hotpot eatery is staffed by more than a dozen automated servers, the distant and brightly colored relations of Star Wars' golden droid C-3PO. The robots whir around the room on little bicycles carrying meat and veggies to be dipped by restaurant-goers into bubbling broth. Customers need not shout, weep or make obscene gestures to get their waiter's attention.