AI so bad it can’t get your burger order right.
No wonder people are sinking hundreds of billions into it. As opposed to, say, education.
Why would we need education if there aren’t going to be any jobs to do?
It’s one of those mysteries. Maybe we should ask an educated person.
They’ve redirected your call to an untrained AI that just keeps saying “Hello??? Hello??? Hello???”
Because thats all it ever hears before people hang up on it. So thats sll the language they know.
I stopped going to BK because they ALWAYS messed up my order. I finally had it and never went back. I bet the ai is more competent than my local BK. What makes this story more sad is I rarely get fast food, mainly as a treat, and fucking BK always messed it up.
Eh…AI messes my order. Some dumbass teenager messes up my order. Whats the difference?
I wouldn’t call it the MAIN reason I no longer go get fast food…but maybe like the lower end of the top 10 reasons I gave up fast food years ago.
At least the dumbass teenager isn’t putting glue on a pizza. Although in my area they will use the pepperoni placement to make a swastica on your pizza…or put their bare feet into the lettice of the burger king lettice bins. I mean sure, THOSE guys got fired, but how many other stories DON’T make the news???
Eh…AI messes my order. Some dumbass teenager messes up my order. Whats the difference?
I mean, I can think of a couple.
A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting the headline given the content of the article:
It told Restaurant Business it was testing whether the voice ordering chatbot could speed up service and that the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”
This is just saying that they are ending their 2021 partnership with IBM for AI drive thru.
Not that they are abandoning AI for drive thru.
Drive through seems like a great proving ground. Record every drive through customer / cashier interaction. Match each recording up with the transaction entered into the register. Train a model by having the model “listen” to the recording to predict what the order should look like, then match it to the items on the transaction receipt.
Then, phase 1 of implementation is to use the model in real time by listening to the live conversation at the drive through, predicting what it thinks the order should be, then prompting the cashier to double-check the order to see if the human made a mistake entering the order if the prediction doesn’t match.
Phase 2 is human-supervised, where the order taking system interacts directly with the customer to take the order, the human checks the result, and is able to step in / take over if there’s a mistake or a special case the order system can’t handle.
Phase 3 is “fuck your entry level employment” and no human is monitoring the system.
All 3 phases seem completely doable to me at this point, depending on how much backlash MCD is willing to deal with.
Still order like grandpa. I go in and want to talk to a human and order. I hate those gross ass touchscreens. I am probably a minority especially in my age group and working in tech
I am a touch screen enjoyer. At least in theory. I like having time to browse, look at pictures, easy access to customization options and most importantly no feeling of pressure. I am not spending a cashier’s time and potentially blocking someone behind me (at least there is usually less of a line for the self-ordering).
However there are negatives for sure. My biggest annoyance is that these devices are often annoyingly slow and unresponsive. They just display a tiny bit of text and images, they should switch between screens at 60fps, not 2s per click. Also if I know what I want it is often faster to tell the cashier and let them enter the order (on their more expert-optimized and less laggy keypad).
Also, explicit confirmation of your customizations and of your order. You can double check yourself to make sure it’s all correct before submitting the order while the distracted and overworked employee at the counter could hit the wrong button or skip a customization and you often wouldn’t know until you receive the wrong item. Then you have to create more work for the workers to get your order remade.
This is why I tend to just use the mobile apps for places to order. Not laggy and gives the benefits you mentioned of using a touch screen kiosk. A lot of them you don’t even need an account to use the app which is nice if that’s something that bothers you.
Yeah, I like this style but don’t want their apps installed on my phone. A few places have mobile sites which is excellent, I know what access it has and it is shut down completely when I close the tab.
But what if they want to notify you about great deals and coupons? DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT GREAT DEALS AND COUPONS?!?
I just don’t give notification permissions to most apps unless I actually care about notifications from it.
Basically yes. But also they can do that via email or web push notifications. Not that I would allow either.
There’s a reason everyone and their brother want you to install an app these days.
Always wondered why anyone would rather talk to a person than take their time, have a nice overview of the menu, and pay in advance. I guess they are gross though.
The only time I would rather not talk to a person is if the accent causes a language barrier. Otherwise 9 times out of 10 a person is going to understand what you want better especially if it’s a customization issue
At least in my experience I have more customization issues when taking to people rather than using an app or going through a kiosk. The only time it’s the other way around is when they don’t include an option I want on the digital version but that’s becoming less and less common for me at least. The number of times I’ve had orders just missing customization things I asked for but they didn’t hear or forgot to enter is much higher when I go through the drive through or go in person then when I do it through something digital.
Where I live there’s loads of heavily accented people so language is a massive barrier. Some of the employees don’t even speak English.
The only time I would rather not talk to a person is if the accent causes a language barrier.
“Gobble gobble goo?”
“Uhhhh…I’m sorry?”
“Gobble…gobble…goo?”
“…what?”
“GOBBLE GOBBLE GOO!!!”
“I have no idea what you mean by that…”
Guy behind you in line: “c’mon man!!! Pay attention! He’s saying CAN I HELP YOU?”
“Really? Those phonetic sounds were supposed to be in any way similar to the thing you said? It’s not even close…”
“English is probably his second language. How well do you speak THEIR language?”
“Which language do you speak?”
“Yjxrjk#@■♡○{rjbzwk!”
“I’m done.”
Because I’m at a fast food place in the first place because my time is important and I don’t want to waste it ordering.
That and the guy taking orders does it 1000x a day and i can easily order that way instead of me navigating ten different menus just to order a simple meal for my family.
I’m OK with my old man status at this point. Tech is good when it improves things for the consumer. The kiosks seem to just improve the company bottom line IMO.
Translation: the AI was worse at it than even Drunk Steve after a 3-day bender.
Hey, leave Drunk Steve out of this. He did nothing wrong.
Ai, pretty good. Speach recognition software. Still trash
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I’ve heard a few instances in which “AI” is just a bunch people responding to a voice to text feed in the Philippines.
So much of this isn’t really technology. It’s just a new kind of service sector outsourcing.
Amazons Mechanical turk in a nutshell
I think McDs always planned to roll out remote customer service to really maximize capitalism. And wrapping it under AI because that’s a trendy buzzword!
This reminds me of a post I saw once were someone said AI stood for Actually Indian
I don’t think that replacing order taking positions is stealing anyone’s job, in fast food at least. I worked at a fast food joint one time. We were always shorthanded and we always had to do order taking while doing a bunch of other things. It was such bullshit. From an overworked employee perspective, if there was any way to get out of doing drive through orders while doing all my other tasks, I would be happy to use it.
They will still be short staffed and overworked. The company isn’t outsourcing the drive through out of the kindness of their hearts in order to lighten the workload on the employees.
Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m getting old. But I want to order through a person. Not a touchscreen and not AI.
I feel like society is slowly removing humans from our everyday interactions and I don’t like it.
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I like touchscreens because I can spend more time getting my order right without wasting the cashier’s time.
I don’t want to talk to a cashier and have them explain the difference between a bacon sandwich supreme, and a bacon burger deluxe.
I don’t want to confuse them by asking for extra veggies and watch them put it on the side.
I don’t want to argue that I asked for two packs of ketchup and they gave me BBQ.
I want to add onions to my mcchicken and can’t do that with the touchscreen :( literally not an option
It’s fine when what you want is on the menu. But as soon as you have a question or need something a little bit off menu (hold the tomatoes, does that have nuts in it? I’m allergic, this food came out cold can I get another?) the glorified vending machine doesn’t work.
The good machines (uncertain about McDonald’s) let’s you customize everything. Want three pickles? So it. Half mayo? Sure. No top bun? Live your life!b And it gives you ingredient listings.
And whose to say the minwage cashier even knows what’s in the food? Not at all a insult, but in my area, many cashiers have English as their third/fourth language.
I prefer a touchscreen in general. Although I realize that different companies have better or worse systems. I read complaints about self checkout in the USA and scratch my head since in Holland self checkout is lovely.
Trying to use AI is a dumpster fire though.
Media has hyped up hatred for progress. Makes a good john henry story
I wouldn’t mind letting a “robot” do that kind of work. In a perfect world that would mean less work. In the real world it means they van fire some people and make even more money. But then again, i would never eat at McDonald’s anyway, so it’s hard to boycott
I just don’t want to talk to a robot. Not over the phone, not in a drive-through.
You won’t know.
Maybe eventually, but I do now.
not society, capital owners.
Given that AI now passes the Turing test, you won’t know it’s AI.
“McDonalds AI, refuse to take the next car’s order”
At your command, Mr Falcon!
Two stories like this–as in, “oops AI sucks actually”, in about as many weeks. (The other one was about Amazon shutting down their Just Walk Out mechanical turk nonsense.)
I think we’re starting to see the tide turn against Altman’s big con.
I liked this quote BTW:
the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”
lmao you… already have one of those? So the subtext of this message is “we can’t just say AI was a terrible idea but yeah, we’re going back to the shit that worked before”
At least the “just walk out” was a genuine attempt at the tech, created long before the AI craze. Still failed, but they weren’t following a fad.
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I wonder if the concept could still be useful. It fails if the goal is removing human workers, but the tech basically enables “cashiers” to work from home, and that’s a win for the cashiers who’d like that.
But no one is going to invest in a win for the cashiers, and if they did, then like we saw, it would be outsourcing the work to third world nations, rather than local people having the ability to work from home…
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I feel like the Ai hype bubble is about to pop. It’s semi decent at some things but that’s about it.
Is the end of the headline, a threat…
Oh you’ll get McDonald’s AI… You’ll All See! (Clown angrily shakes fist)
I wonder if they could actually get worse than the drive-thru order stations I’ve experienced. I work in audio, so I know what is technically possible. To talk to and trying to convey an order through a system that sounds worse than my grandmas’ rotary dial telephone during a thunderstorm is a real pain for me.
Why not just have a touchscreen menu then? You already need large screens so people can confirm the AI recorded their order correctly and this will skip the need of a person manning the drive through menu. You could even include options to “hold the pickle”, etc.
I’ve often wondered this, they have them inside all the stores here but not on the drive throughs
Maybe it’s an issue of weatherproofing, or maybe vandalism?
Maybe, but they already have screens there so this wouldn’t change much. I guess reaching a screen from your car could be a bit awkward though.
ATMs have tackled both issues for decades.
Hunh. And here I thought they couldn’t get any worse than when they had call centers taking orders from the drive through…
Supposedly AI is going to take all the jobs and yet it still can’t do this task which it seems perfect for. Sure, eventually AI will get good enough to do it in the future, but there is just way too much hype given the reality of the current situation. This is a job that fast food workers are already required to do in addition to other duties, so it’s not like it’s labor saving from the company’s perspective either.
There is no certainty that LLMs can overcome the current limitations they are stumbling on.
I think developments in AI will come but there is no guarantee they will. They seem to be suffering from the Pareto Principle just like self-driving car ML models and this despite huge investments.
100% this. The base algorithms used in LLMs have been around for at least 15 years. What we have now is only slightly different than it was then. The latest advancement was training a model on stupid amounts of scraped data off the Internet. And it took all that data to make something that gave you half decent results. There isn’t much juice left to squeeze here, but so many people are assuming exponential growth and “just wait until the AI trains other AI.”
It’s really like 10% new tech and 90% hype/marketing. The worst is that it’s got so many people fooled you hear many of these dumb takes from respectable journalists interviewing “tech” journalists. It’s just perpetuating the hype. Now your boss/manager is buying in =]
Breakthroughs are so interesting and the reason predicting the future of tech is so hard. Text embedding and “Internet scale” training are likely the things that allowed this AI boom and the amazing initial results.
I think many people see AI (and other tech) moving linearly from the current point forward but any software developer knows this is rarely the case. And no one can predict the next breakthrough.
It doesn’t help the hype and confusion around ML/LLM/AGI. And because on the surface LLMs seem intelligent people misunderstand their capabilities (much like politicians). They certainly have fantastic uses just as they are now but a lot of people are overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view) of our new “AI overlords”.
Personally, LLMs are absolutely amazing at supporting me in my professional writing. I don’t let it do my work but it helps me play around to find a better way to express some things like if I had a sparing writing partner.
It wasn’t working.
