Technology

I think those kiosks with the big touch screen and the mobile apps work pretty well already, I always rather use them and see a picture what I can order instead of talking to the person.

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.

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

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.

I actually went to a mcdonalds that did this. It was overall way more slow and annoying. I would be willing to make that concession if knew that it was something to worked towards a better future for humans, but all its means is that someone is getting fired under capitalism. Also it failed to understand if I wanted sauce and just referred me to someone actually working.

Translation: the AI was worse at it than even Drunk Steve after a 3-day bender.

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.

"McDonalds AI, refuse to take the next car's order"

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.

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"

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.

Why would they in the first place? What's wrong with a touchscreen menu to take an order?

Then, of course, I'm not sure such places fundamentally even need human personnel other than maintenance techs. Standard ingredients, prepackaged I think, standard hardware to cook, standard everything. It can just be a huge burger-selling machine with no human in sight.

I feel like the Ai hype bubble is about to pop. It's semi decent at some things but that's about it.

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.

Is the end of the headline, a threat...

Using AI seems extremely excessive compared to a regular interface or human.