waittime
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Google shows the waiting times at your favorite restaurants
If weird food trends (cronut, anyone?) have taught us anything it's that people are prepared to wait a long time for a seat at a restaurant, so whether you're visiting a popular local eatery or Time Out's latest gastro-pick, you're faced with two choices. Attempt to beat the crowds by having dinner at 4pm, or rock up whenever and hope the people in the line ahead give up before you do. Now though, in a development we can't believe didn't happen sooner, Google will show you the wait times of nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world.
Indiana Pacers use AI to help you get hot dogs faster
Among the hassles you deal with at sports events, waiting in line is one of the most annoying. What if you miss the start of play because you had to satisfy a hot dog craving? The Indiana Pacers want to alleviate that headache. They're partnering with tech startup WaitTime to shorten waits through artificial intelligence. The newly-launched system takes photos of arena lines at a rate of 10 times per second, and interprets that data to gauge not just queuing times, but also order completion times and the number of people who've given up. The Pacers display the wait times on screens and a mobile app to show you where wait times are short -- you'll know that a given washroom is empty, or whether it'd be quicker to grab nachos instead of a burger.
