> It didn't take long to prototype. Polishing and shipping it to non-expert users would take much longer than I've spent on it so far. I'd have to test for and solve a ton of installation problems

I've found some success at this by using Nix... but Nix is a whole 'nother ball of yarn to learn. It WILL get you to declarative/deterministic installs of any piece of the toolchain it covers, though, and it does a hell of a lot better job managing dependencies than anything in Python's ecosystem ever will (in fact, I am pretty sure that Python's being terrible at this is actually driving Nix adoption)

As an example of the power Nix might enable, check out https://nixified.ai/ (which is a project that hasn't been updated in some months and I hope is not dead... It does have some forks on Github, though). Assuming you already have Nix installed, you can get an entire ML toolchain up including a web frontend with a single command. I have dozens of projects on my work laptop, all with their own flake.nix files, all using their own versions of dependencies (which automatically get put on the PATH thanks to direnv), nothing collides with anything else, everything is independently updateable. I'm actually the director of engineering at a small startup and having our team's dev environments all controlled via Nix has been a godsend already (as in, a massive timesaver).

I do think that you could walk a live demo of this into, say, McDonald's corporate, and walk out with a very large check and a contract to hire a team to look into building it out into a product, though. (If you're going to look at chains, I'd suggest Wawa first though, as they seem to embrace new ordering tech earlier than other chains.)

I wish docker could be used more easily with graphic cards and other hardware peripherals (speakers/mic in this case). It would solve a lot of these issues.