Testing Your Way to Innovation: The Story of a Robotic Bartender

The challenge was simple: Build a voice-powered mixologist capable of making drinks based on whichever spirits and mixers were placed into it. Working with his team, Mark Gharibian designed an AWS-powered, Alexa-driven, Arduino/Raspberry Pi-running, laser-cut bartender prototype. Using an iterative approach, they designed and developed the hardware and software in tandem. Each iteration taught them something new and changed the way they approached testing in the innovation space. They operated in a nontraditional way, on a nontraditional project, using nontraditional tools—and how they got there was the fun part. Join Mark to hear about the project and how it can be applied to your own. We'll cover leveraging testing as a means for innovation by promoting iterative design and development, testing conversational and voice-enabled user interfaces, and bridging the divide between software and hardware testing.