In Seattle, the only thing we love more than coffee is our coffee shops.
On a six-block walk I pass at least a half dozen, each with their own vibe: one focused on chai, another inside a yoga studio, a Starbucks that’s surprisingly busy for late afternoon downtown. I passed them all up to get to one shop in particular, where a barista named Jarvis would address me by name and make me a thoroughly decent latte with rose-flavored syrup — nothing out of the ordinary in Seattle. But Jarvis, unlike the other baristas keeping the city’s many shops humming, is a robot.
Hill7 is a luxury apartment building located between the courthouse, the convention center, and a bunch of surface streets that function as an extended I-5 on-ramp. It’s at the center of it all, and also nowhere in particular. To get there, I walk past vacant storefronts with graffitied signs advertising prime retail space, and also an Amazon Go store that looked deserted from the outside. Amazon would announce its imminent closure the next day.
The robot barista resides in a large stand in the Hill7 lobby, sharing space with a place that sells sushi by the pound. There’s a not-unpleasant soy sauce and seaweed smell in the air as I place my order on an iPad. Jarvis isn’t a full humanoid robot, nor is it a glorified vending machine. Jarvis is a robotic arm made by a Seattle-based company called Artly, and is positioned within reach of a customized La Marzocco espresso machine. It “talks” over a loudspeaker, directing customers to order on the tablet and complimenting their choice of beverage when they do.
For the most part, it does all the things human baristas do — grabbing a cup, moving the portafilter from the espresso machine to the grinder and back again, pouring latte art. It doesn’t have to go as far as pressing buttons or pulling levers to start grinding beans or brewing the espresso thanks to some behind-the-scenes automation, but as it makes my drink, it goes through a lot of motions I’m quite familiar with.
I was horrified to learn that the company wanted me to actually talk to the customers while I made their coffee
I got my first barista job during college, and during training I was horrified to learn that the company wanted me to actually talk to the customers while I made their coffee. Not only did I have to learn a new set of skills and memorize a bunch of drink recipes, I had to swallow my social anxiety and make small talk with people who didn’t really want to be talking to me? An actual nightmare. But I tried anyway, and at times I had to focus so hard on the social aspect that I completely screwed up the coffee bit. I still think about the new dad who came in and carefully specified decaf for his order — I got so caught up in making small talk that I gave him a beverage with three fully caffeinated shots of espresso.
Later I did a stint at an artisanal gelato shop where the owner took deep pride in running a serious coffee program and didn’t mandate small talk. I learned how to dial in espresso, how to make a pour-over (not nearly as simple as the name implies). I was also in the messiest part of my 20s, going through my first breakup and in a not-unrelated incident, showing up to work so hungover that the owner took me aside, visibly worried, and asked if I was okay. He thought I was having some kind of breakdown; I told him I just got too drunk the night before.
Jarvis, on the other hand, has never shown up hungover, or late, or sweating from the six-block walk to get to work. Jarvis stays right where it is when the shop closes at 3PM. I also paid a visit to Artly’s location near Pike Place Market, where Jarvis is flanked by two other robotic arms: Amanda and Ponyo. At both locations, the robot baristas are overseen by a human. In one instance, the human assistant had to refill a tank of milk when it ran empty while making my drink. They also wiped up some drops of spilled milk on the counter in front of Jarvis. But mostly, the human Artly employee seems to sit alone scrolling on their phone while the robots repeat a greeting message on loop, despite a lack of customers.
I’d met Jarvis before. Weeks earlier at CES, I was in a line at the Las Vegas Convention Center Starbucks that looked to be about 40 minutes long. I typed the word “coffee” in the CES app vendor search, and wouldn’t you know, Artly had a booth just a short walk away. I envisioned a machine churning out mediocre coffee with silly custom latte art. I was, to be quite honest, sure I would not like it. I was wrong.
Jarvis, so Artly says, is trained on the movements of a specific human barista: Joe Yang, head of Artly’s coffee program and a US Coffee Championship winner in 2023. It mimics his movements as it makes each drink, which takes about three minutes according to the company (and confirmed by my own experience). Jarvis uses AI to make adjustments as needed on the fly, narrating aloud things like “there are no grounds in the portafilter” when it encounters something unexpected. The drinks it has made for me — a cappuccino at CES, the aforementioned rose latte, and a plain latte — have been good to very good. Certainly better than I expected from a nonhuman barista, and honestly better than the kind of drink I would typically get from a human-operated cafe that serves but doesn’t specialize in espresso drinks.
Jarvis, Joe Yang, and hundreds of human baristas across Seattle have all mastered one particularly crucial task in making an espresso drink: steaming milk properly. To make a great latte or cappuccino, you first need to create tiny bubbles by bringing the steam wand just barely above the surface of the milk, and then let the steam create a vortex in the milk pitcher to mix this “micro foam” into a unified texture. Milk that has been properly steamed looks like wet paint. You can’t replicate it by heating the milk and then whipping it around with a frothing tool. You’ll know you’re in for a bad latte if you hear the steam wand screaming against the sides of a milk pitcher, a sure sign that no texture is being created. Proper steaming is as quiet as a whisper.
I made a lot of bad lattes before I learned the right way; it certainly wasn’t part of the training at my corporate coffee gig. But that was mostly beside the point at a shop where most people either wanted some variation on a mocha or a drip coffee, black, as fast as they could get it. The espresso machines at that job did most of the work for us, too. All I really had to do was keep the bean hopper topped up and push the right button to pull a double shot of espresso.
My old boss at the gelato shop mentioned once that staffing was the hardest part of his job as a small business owner. Hiring, training, managing schedules, inevitably training new workers as people left. That job was the most physically demanding I’d ever had, and truthfully I wasn’t a very good employee. But watching the owner work seven days a week year-round, covering shifts when one of us called off unexpectedly, watching his investment go down the drain in a very literal sense when I mindlessly started rinsing out a pan of freshly prepared sorbetto (a real thing that happened!) — I understood what he meant. People are hard.
Giant corporations seem to agree. Starbucks headquarters is about 3 miles south of Artly’s Hill7 shop. I used to bike there often to visit the Reserve Roastery located on the first floor, which was welcoming and always busy. The Reserve was Starbucks’ best impression of a fancy third-wave coffee shop, with a more focused menu and a real sit-down-and-stay vibe, and I never got a bad latte there.
Starbucks abruptly shuttered it last fall, identifying it vaguely as one of many closed or soon-to-be-closed stores where the company was “unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance.” The barista workforce at that Reserve and one across town in Capitol Hill happened to be unionized; the company denies this had any influence on its decision to close the stores.
My barista career ended decades ago, but it still feels like a core part of my identity as a worker, and maybe even as a human. Sure, I learned how to make a damn good latte, but I also learned discipline — not to mention the consequences you face in its absence. I learned how to make small talk even when I just wanted to keep my head down. I learned how terrible it feels to come to work after getting wasted the night before, and never did it again. I learned how to screw up, badly, and pick up and keep going because people are depending on you. I wasn’t the ideal employee; I was human.
My most pessimistic view on Jarvis is as a neat replacement for the human tendency to be human. Robot baristas don’t make the wrong drink. They don’t need breaks. They don’t unionize. They’re predictable, reliable, and honestly, capable of making a better latte than I made in my button-pushing corporate coffee job. They’d be easier to manage in a hundred different ways. But can you even really call a robot coffee shop a coffee shop?
I wasn’t the ideal employee; I was human
Artly has deployed its robot barista in a few places outside of Seattle, and it seems to be enjoying mixed results. There’s a location at Pier 39 in a touristy part of San Francisco, but a couple of other Bay Area-adjacent shopping mall locations listed on the company website appear as “permanently closed” on Google Maps; both are close to other, human-led options. And I should note that my experiences might not be typical of any Artly visit. While the drinks I had were better than average, they were also near company headquarters, or in the case of the CES visit, under the direct supervision of the company’s leadership. Not everyone has glowing things to say about the coffee quality. Even robots have a hard time meeting a high quality bar consistently, it seems.
I’m encouraged by the fact that Artly doesn’t really position Jarvis as a replacement for human barista jobs where they already exist. Right now, you can buy a coffee from one of their robots at Muji stores in the US and Canada. Notably, Muji didn’t employ any baristas before it got the robots. The company also lists Tesla’s Fremont factory as a partner location. As a job perk, especially somewhere less densely populated by fancy coffee shops than downtown Seattle, a robot barista doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
As an addition to an airport lounge, or maybe operating at a train station long after human workers have all gone home for the night, I think a robot barista makes total sense. Can you make a viable business out of those scenarios? I’m less sure. On both of my recent visits to Artly’s shops, I didn’t see anyone else come in and order a drink. Maybe both places are busier in the morning as people head to work, or during the summer when literal boatloads of tourists visit downtown. But especially around the Pike Place Market location, many of the coffee shops in the neighborhood look just as busy as ever.
If a coffee shop is just a place to walk in, place an order, and walk out with a coffee better than the one you can make at home, then Artly does the job. Depending on the hour and the day, sometimes that’s all I need a coffee shop to be. But more often than that, a coffee shop is a destination. It’s a place to go when I want to get out of the house. A physical manifestation of community. The coffee is usually excellent — shoutout once again to Seattle coffee culture — but even when it’s less than perfect, it offers humanity. And no robot can replicate that.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
