The faces of customers at Sydney's Bahista Cafe are scanned by an iPad as they approach the barista at the coffee machine.
Instantly the customer's name, favourite order and whether they are due for a loyalty reward flashes up on another iPad facing staff.
It's a high-tech facial recognition system that works using cafe owner Geoff Cropley's own technology, which he's dubbed NoahFace.
"I bought this cafe 3?? years ago and from day one I wanted to remember my customers names as I thought it was a way to have a better relationship with them," Cropley says.
"I thought I could use my human brain and I failed miserably. I searched the world for a low-cost face recognition [system] and there was nothing out there, all the solutions were multimillion-dollar ones. So I went about creating what we have today."
Cropley spent almost two years working on the technology with developer John MacLean and after a failed prototype, which was "too slow", launched NoahFace at the cafe in July 2016.
"Customers overwhelmingly love it," Cropley says. "They say they come to the cafe because it is so personal."
Bahista Cafe turns over about $1.2 million a year and Cropley says in the last 12 months of using NoahFace, business is up 37 per cent.
Customers can opt out if they want to.
"We have a large sign at the point of sale which says we may record their biometric data for customer service and if they don't want to be part tell us and we won't put them in," he says. "We are very open and frank that we have this program."
A new era
Bahista Cafe is one of a growing number of small businesses around Australia utilising facial recognition technology.
Chris de Silva, global head of facial recognition at tech giant NEC, told NEC Australia's Advanced Recognition Systems Experience in October that facial recognition offers a new era of personalised service.
"Face recognition has been around in some form for a number of years, but really it has only been in the last few years that it has taken on a strength that makes it very viable," de Silva says.
"It can be used for authentication, identification and monitoring."
de Silva says there is a lot of "disinformation" about facial recognition technology.
"Some people like to talk up this Big Brother scenario," he says. "The issue is not the technology, but the issue of privacy and how you deal with that."
He says as facial recognition technology develops, applications of it will increase.
"We have some really good software and algorithms but how you apply it is really the secret sauce," he says. "We don't have all the answers to that."
NightKey
Paul Howie, NEC Australia's general manager for consulting and business solutions, told Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the event that NEC is working in partnership with lots of small Australian start-ups using facial recognition.
"In the small business space, we tend to be taking the large stuff and scaling it down to a transaction-based model," he says.
Night club entry and security system NightKey is one of the small businesses using NEC's technology after founder Mario Madaffari created a finger print registration system to be used at the entrance.
"With NightKey, we have added facial monitoring inside the night club to improve it," Howie says.
He says facial recognition technology is reaching a "tipping point", with the government looking to create a national facial recognition database.
Growth potential
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???NoahFace has attracted more than $1 million in seed funding from a group of wealthy individuals, including Toby's Estate founder Toby Smith, and the technology is already being used in Bar Bellaccino in Sydney, Hotel Richmond in Adelaide and Coffee Roasters in Brisbane.
"We are now using the underlying technology in a range of other business solutions, including time and attendance integrating with payroll," Cropley says.
"Following that, which will be mid-next year, we will launch access so when you walk to a door it will open."
Canberra Airport and Rhino Rack Australia have signed up to use NoahFace's time and attendance technology and Cropley is enthusiastic about the potential for growth.
"The benefits of automatic, individual identification of people via facial recognition can apply to almost any business scenario," he says.
