Information technology company Accenture Baltics has developed the inevitable mobile app with integrated AI for photo analysis for one of the largest beer producers in Europe, reports Labs of Latvia.
Currently, the brewer – whose identity remains unfortunately confidential – can manage the quality of its product presentation to customers in more than 25 countries.
"By opening the developed app on a mobile device and taking a photo of a glass of beer, artificial intelligence helps to receive immediate feedback and assess whether the beer is well served. One of the important quality parameters in beer evaluation is the height of the foam in the glass, which can indicate the quality of the beer and the conditions under which it was delivered, stored, and poured. If there were changes at any stage, they can be observed in the height of the beer foam," says Labs of Latvia.
Kaspars Auzarējs-Auzers [try saying that after a few], of Accenture Baltics says that the developed mobile app is easy to use, which not only immediately gives the user feedback on the quality of the beer but also gathers information from different countries and places where the beer is sold, allowing the producer to assess the overall quality level and identify areas where for some reason the quality has decreased.
'In a thin glass!'
When developing the app, one of the biggest challenges for the Accenture specialists was to allow AI to differentiate between different glass shapes, a problem human analysts only experience five or six pints into a session.
For this reason, the mysterious manufacturer sent the company more than 30 glasses of different shapes and sizes, as well as beer samples, so that the company’s specialists could train artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize, evaluate, and differentiate the quality of different beers served.
In our favourite piece of jargon in the whole piece, Labs of Latvia explains that:
"The developed technical solution is a computer vision-based beer foam height measurement functionality that combines linear and machine learning algorithms for image processing and runs on AWS cloud services."
We stress, this is not an April Fool story as we are almost into July.
Accenture Liquid Studio [seriously] innovation and technical manager Marks Petrovs says that several years ago Accenture opened a prototyping studio, Liquid Studio, to develop prototypes and turn ideas into various apps and services. One of the projects of this studio is an artificial intelligence prototype for beer quality evaluation, which was later incorporated into a mobile app.
“Artificial intelligence was taught to recognize the measurement of beer glass and foam height in proportion to the type and size of the glass, according to different measurement categories. We are pleased that the feedback received about the mobile app from the beer producer is positive,” said Petrovs.
Accenture experts say that in five years, people’s interaction with the digital environment will be different and "will assist companies in gaining deeper insights into customers and forging meaningful relationships with them, while also offering opportunities to enhance the quality of products and services. The best results in the development of digital products and services will be achieved through the interaction of creative talent and technology."
This can only mean that in the future, AI will not only analyze the beer for you, it will probably drink it, too. But like certain all-too-human people we could mention, it will also be capable of using its super-brain to duck out before it gets its round in. The next logical development would be getting AI to visually analyze your kebab on the way home from the pub to calculate the likelihood that it will give you food poisoning.
Meanwhile, if any brewers would like to be told whether their beer is any good or not – in slightly slurred tones – by the finely-calibrated palates of LSM's experienced journalists, please send a crate to the usual address*. And don't bother sending 30 different glasses, we already have some at the back of the filing cabinet.
