Microsoft Introduces The World's First AI-Generated Whiskey

Artificial intelligence is helping the world by assisting in all sorts of problems from reading minds to appearing as a witness in law trials. Now, AI is creating perfect whiskey blends for us.

Microsoft has partnered with a 20-year-old Swedish distillery named Mackmyra and Fourkind, a Finnish technology consultancy — to bring forth the world’s first AI-created whiskey.

AI helps in creating new recipes

This is the first time a complex consumer product recipe has been generated with the help of machine learning.

The whiskey recipe-generating AI, which runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and AI cognitive services, was first fed with distillery’s legacy recipes, sales figures, and customer preferences.

In a blog post by Microsoft, the company explained how the machine learning model then churned out more than 70 million recipes that could be used to create different blends of whiskey.

How does it taste?

The whiskey’s flavor is described as “vanilla with fine oak notes, fruits with citrus & pear, herbal spices with slight tobacco leaves and a very small hint of smoke.”

Mackmyra’s AI whiskey was premiered last week at The Next Web Conference 2019 in Amsterdam and is expected to hit markets commercially in August 2019.

But why use AI for it?

The goal behind training the algorithms was to use all the available information to come up with new combinations that would never cross a human mind. This technique could also be used by other food and beverage producers in a broader range of applications.

Will robots steal humans’ jobs?

While the goal behind this project was to find new recipes, whiskey distillers were quick to point out that AI-beings won’t rob humans of their jobs in the distillery business.

Traditionally, the process of creating and tasting recipes is done by a Master Blender who spends his entire life experimenting with whiskey flavors.

However, the whiskey recipe generating-AI was not created to replace the Master Blender. Algorithms can simply generate formulations but humans are still required to produce whiskey and carry out the final tastings.