Picture being led to your table at a restaurant by a talking ‘cat’ robot, which can serve your meals and collect your dirty dishes. It’s no longer the work of futuristic science fiction as Newcastle-based tech company Spark plans to shake-up the hospitality game.
Venture into a branch of YO! Sushi and you might find ‘BellaBot’, the cat-faced robot roaming around the restaurant floor or buffet chain COSMO, where you might even be treated to a happy birthday sing-a-long from one of the two robots they’ve signed up for.
”The aim is to reduce certain labour costs. Let the robots do repetitive jobs that humans don’t really enjoy doing,” Eric Guo, founder and CEO at Spark, told Prolific North.
Spark, which launched in 2019, initially started out by developing an integrated cloud-based software platform to support the leisure and hospitality sector with operations, encompassing Electronic Point of Sale (EPoS), reservation management and stock control.
As Covid hit the hospitality industry hard, the tech company decided to expand its offering to robotics last year by partnering with Chinese company Pudu Robotics, becoming its official distributor.
“The problem we’re looking at is hospitality and shops are still combating a shortage of staff,” he explained. “The robotics and the smart hospitality platform, together will bring extra value to the UK market.”
He hopes Spark’s hospitality solutions will help the sector to improve efficiency, drive down costs and tackle the rising number of staff shortages across the industry.
