Is it too much effort for you when you visit your local fast food restaurant to use the touchscreen to order and use contacts to pay?

Featured Image VIA

If you answered yes to that question, then you’ll probably be interested in KFC’s new technology which enables you to pay for your meal just by smiling. That’s literally it.

Currently being trialled over in Hangzhou, China, the ‘Smile To Pay’ technology takes about one to two seconds using facial recognition software to check the identity of the person paying. They also have to enter their mobile phone number to protect against fraud, which kinda sounds a bit longer than tapping your contactless card or typing in your PIN. Still, I suppose it’s a nice way to do things and might make you feel a little happier or something.

Here’s a video of the technology in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-NIAUhU2E0

Tidy. Looks like it works no matter what style of outfit/make up she’s wearing too, which is no doubt a very useful way of doing things. Would be so annoying if you were all set up just to smile to pay and then the goddamn thing didn’t even work.

Jidong Chen, head of biometric identification technology at Ant Financial who are behind the technology, said the following:

Taking the facial-recognition payment technology offline was no easy task.

On how we detect when someone’s photo is being manipulated when someone is falsely impersonating another person — we prevent this by merging software and hardware by linking sophisticated algorithms with the 3D camera.

We can prevent biometric spoofing.

Great news there Jidong – I was very concerned somebody might steal my face in order to get free KFC meals. Can sleep easy now knowing that this will never be the case.

For more KFC, check out this pizza version of the double down that they just released. Holy moly.