Comment by phkahler
6 months ago
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.
Having a screen displaying your order is something many drive-through restaurants implemented long ago. It's a useful error detection mechanism regardless of what is interpreting the customer's speech.
We can also say, having observed those implementations for the last few decades, that the system is not always working for one reason or another. In my own experience, when the capability appears to be there, I see my order details about half the time. Some of that is probably humans not pushing buttons they're supposed to, but likely also includes a bunch of technical failure conditions.
When I'm already talking to another human and I don't have a way to visually inspect the order as it's being built, I can ask for confirmation of items and modifiers. I can focus this on areas where there might be more confusion - "did you catch the extra mayo for that?" and so forth.
If the order display system isn't working and an AI is doing the speech interpretation, I have less confidence on where errors might be made or the types of errors that are likely to be made. I wouldn't be able to confidently move forward without getting the AI to read back my entire order (taking a lot of time) or transferring to a human (also taking a lot of time, and now I'm burning the human's time).
From the customer perspective, the happy path is not improved by AI order takers. In the best case, you have basically the same experience as you would with a human order taker. The failure paths are made worse. Responsibility for verifying the AI's accuracy is placed on the customer, and the customer also has to be the one saying "I need a human to intervene." As many errors will eventually require human intervention, the time taken to resolve an error will tend to be longer than without AI as the customer has to get past whatever guardrails are in place to prevent immediate transfer out of the AI flow. The error rate is likely to be higher with AI order takers in general, meaning customers encounter these failure paths more often.
IMO that's a common theme with a lot of AI customer service 'solutions' out there today...from the customer perspective, happy paths are minimally (or not at all) improved, and failure paths shift cognitive load and responsibility from the business to the customer.