Comment by phkahler
6 months ago
McDonalds was testing a system like that with one at a location near me. I found it quite useful and good at taking my order. When it messed up there was a backup person to take over and get it right. Normally McDonalds has one person doing two jobs - taking orders and also collecting money and giving change at the first window. This AI was relieving that person of the order-taking job, but they still listened in and would take over if needed. I'm not sure that would ever increase profits, but it definitely reduced the burden on that person working two jobs. It worked well enough IMHO that I was hoping they'd roll it out to more locations, but the canceled it so I guess my experience was not universal ;-)
This is almost a best-case for AI. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech are pretty good, a human can take over when needed (they can even be remote), and it's low-stakes.
I don't like speech to text in this context because of how often negation words are either missed or inserted, and how commonly "I want <item>, no <ingredient>" and "I want <item> with <ingredient 1>, <ingredient 2>, <ingredient 3>" show up in the fast food ordering context.
That's also the kind of small detail likely to be missed by the human who is only half-listening to the conversation being had with the customer.
At the drive thru, the order was displayed on a large screen as you added items. You could plainly see if it got something wrong, and you could verbally have it make some corrections. If it got totally f-ed up you could just ask for a human.
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In the early stages of that pilot, the backup person was off-site in a call center so the higher the AI failure rate was the more expensive the program was. If they realized it's better to have the backup person be the order-taker, that's pretty good.
There’s a Wendy’s near me that uses AI speech to text and it seems pretty flawless.