Forget fingerprint scanning, now you can pay just by smiling. China’s Alibaba has launched its new ‘smile to pay’ service in Hangzhou in China. As of now, they are testing this service at KFC.
The whole payment process does not require your phone. You need to have an Alipay account with facial recognition enabled. For payment, the company has installed 3D camera to verify the identity of the customer. Watch the video below to check how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-NIAUhU2E0
For additional security, Alipay also has a phone number verification option.
In this video, they demonstrated the capability of this recognition. They did make up of the girl and even tried different kinds of dresses and hair wigs. In one of the demo, they even put the group of people but it was able to recognize the person to confirm the payment.
This facial recognition tech was showcased almost 2 years back at IFA in Germany. At that event, President Jack Ma showed off basic capabilities of the app including selfie to pay.
At this moment, I cannot say how effective and safe this payment is. But, it is really interesting and easy to pay. This will also help Alibaba to compete with Tencent’s WeChat Pay which is very popular in China.
