Digi-Cheers®

I've always thought that it would be cool to walk into my corner bar, plop down on a stool, have the bartender greet me by name, and say "the usual." However, what is distinctly uncool is being a blithering alcoholic, and that's what usually happens if you visit a big-city bar often enough for the wait-staff to actually learn who you are and remember it reliably.

Of course if you live in a tiny town with only one pub, this naturally happens even without any digital enhancement required. I'm aiming this invention at pubs and restaurants in bigger towns that have a much larger client base and higher turnover among employees.

Give each employee a small portable computer, with a web-cam discreetly hidden in their cap (or bouffant hairdo, or parrot-on-shoulder as the theme requires). It would have a touch screen for taking orders. (Deluxe model features heads-up display integrated into the wait-person's glasses so they can maintain eye contact). There's also an ear-piece for a voice interface.

It is key that this whole system be discreet, and what parts of it that are visible look just like a normal restaurant order-taking system.

As the waiter/bartender talks to you, the web-cam image of your face is fed through a recognition algorithm, and your record at this establishment comes up on the wearable/portable computer. In this record is everything you ever ordered and when, sorted by occurrence, along with some miscellaneous notes.

As the record is called up, a text-to-speech algorithm can feed top info out of your record to the employee via the earpiece. //zzz...his name is Tim// "Hi, Tim, how are you?"

So when you say "the usual", what to bring is right there on the top of the list on the handheld, and the waiter just taps it and says "coming right up". --even if the fellow was just hired yesterday, and your usual is some bizarre food item only known to half-bakers. That is, as long as you've been there at least once before.

Further, when the waiter/bartender disappears to take care of your order (as they often do) they can add notations to your record based on their conversation with you. This is exactly like professional contact management software that many sales people use. So if you talked about your wife, that will go into the record. //zzz....his wife's name is Theora// "So how is Theora doing?"

The end result is that every employee of this restaurant knows who you are and what you like, and you feel very at home starting with the SECOND time you go there, instead of the fifty-third. It also frees up a whole lot of conversation time with the bartender or waiter to be spent on more entertaining things like football scores.