Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters
If an LLM can't be trusted with a fast food order, I can't imagine what it is reliable enough for. I really was expecting this was the easy use case for the things.
It sounds like most orders still worked, so I guess we'll see if other chains come to the same conclusion.
This is a problem that requires zero AI.
A touchscreen kiosk is all you need to have the customer place their own order. You just need to have 2-3 ordering stations as they will be slower than trainer staff.
But shareholders demand AI
Touchscreen kiosks are hard to reach through car windows.
Of course, the real solution is banning drive-throughs because they're fucking terrible urbanism to begin with:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/21/no-we-still-dont-need-drive-throughs
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/business/drive-thru-fast-food-chick-fil-a-urban-planning
Man, I never used fast food, or drive throughs as much as I have since I developed a mobility disorder. Last week I put a pickup order in at my local coffee shop out of habit, and couldn't carry both my coffee and the breakfast sandwich to my car at the same time. Which sounds so stupid, but it took so much extra energy for both trips into the store that I was ready to go home and call it a day after that lol
I know the answer is "don't get fast food and just eat at home", but I've also been so tired after work/school that I'm not eating, and I dunno what the answer to that is either. My state isn't a place where people think about how to care for their communities, and most of it has hours of highway between "cities"
God damn. I was just about to invite you to the fuck cars community. In doing so, I needed the like with the !.
In trying to find it on the sidebar, I see you've found that community. As a mod.
Which means the whole basis for my comment is void before I even typed it!
On a similiar note....can you put the ! link in the sidebar?
People use touchscreens for accessing ATMs in the States.
Don't see why this couldn't be possible for fast food. There's proven technology that already exists
Edit: Just to add, fuck cars. And fuck anti-urban infrastructure. Maybe we should do away with touchscreens for fast food, as well as other pro car infrastructure. At least not incentivize it
You could basically get around this with 4 programmers and an expectation around word choice. Voice to text has improved massively, you could just require them to say menu items with modifiers
Not that I disagree about drive throughs in concept, but this is just another problem easily solved by anything but raw LLMs
I forgot that US cars are so massive that this is a problem.
Agree on the urban planning part.
I actually don't know why entering your own order hasn't taken off more, come to think of it.
Chick-fil-A even went the other way, putting 4 high schoolers out in the weather for it. Cold, hot, raining, doesn't matter.
That’s how my local Taco Bell is. If you don’t use your phone to place the order when you walk in there’s four kiosks you walk up to for placing your order. None of the people working are working the counter.
Most people have a hard enough time getting their car close enough to the window to get the food or to handle the card reader. I doubt many people would enjoy the toucn screen ordering as the would struggle tk get close enough and may have to lean way out of their window to order. The touch screen would also have to work reliably while wet or freezing cold.
Then you've got the issue of someone has to clean it and even with regular cleaning it has a huge potential to spread germs. Ultimately with all the disadvantages i think it would be too slow, too inconvenient, and add extra real estate to the drive thru.
I still can't add onions to my mcchicken on the kiosk. I demand humans back!
Also software voice recognition and using this for a shopping cart/order placement system (via phone line) has been a thing since the early 2000s, i know some mail order shops in Germany who used this.
Since 2023, the fast-food chain has introduced the technology at over 500 locations in the US, with the aim of reducing mistakes and speeding up orders.
Bullshit, they just want to save money by replacing employees with AI.
Step 1: replace all your workers with AI Step 2: set new record for unemployment Step 3: most people can't afford your product Step 4: increase the price to compensate for decreasing sales Step 5: blame Obama
Step 1: Replace your executive and board members with LLMs. Despite LLMs being increadibly unintelligent, there will be no loss of leadership IQ in the corporation because they were already unintelligent enough to put a LLM where it doesn't belong because they don't understand what it is and what it isn't.
Step 2: Enjoy the savings of those large useless eater salaries you no longer have to pay.
They don't even reduce cost from the savings. They charge the exact same amount until they want to increase prices.
Oh shit, I didn't even notice that part. Yup, that's a whopper, and not the kind you eat.
Hilarious, what a hero. Thank you king, this is the way to fight unsecure AI slop while they pretend its a legitimate reason to halve their workforce.
You know what would reduce mistakes and speed up orders? Replacing the god-awful audio equipment that every drive thru seems to use. It wouldn't cost much to install good audio equipment and it would quickly pay for itself in time savings since people could hear each other more clearly.
Can’t find a source for this but I remember reading that the audio is intentionally bad because it subconsciously makes people more inclined/pressured to purchasing add-ons or upsells.
What it makes me inclined to do is never use the drive-thru, personally.
🎶 There goes my hero 🎶
One day in 2012 at McDonald's drive thru, talking to a real human on site through the speaker just like the good old days, I ordered
"A Filet o' Fish."
Imagine my surprise at the dollar total and when they handed me a bag of
EIGHT Filet o' Fish.
Amazing level of critical thinking going on at the window when they didn't double check that, lol.
See, this is why I thought AI drivethroughs would be fine. A certain number of mistakes are already made.
After hearing about this I now want to go up to AI menu board at my local Wendy's and order 17x10³¹ triples burgers.
"I'll have 1/0 burgers"
Computer can't understand voices good enough so they think you say something different. For example standard voice to text has failed me for years. Voice control for years and years has still failed me. Using gps? fail every time because the computer or phone in this case thinks i say other words that sound nowhere the same. This is before and after AI. The biggest problem is voice recognition of words. Humans can separate sound and frequency better. Ear drums are better than microphones. Even in quite environments i have a voice that doesn't get translated properly and fails more often than it doesn't. So AI is going to glitch on a lot of voices too because the voice recognition part still works the same flawed way with flawed microphone technology.
"That's a 'you' problem." -- Tech bros, probably
Ear drums are better than microphones
What do you mean about this part? A quality microphone is basically the same thing, although the impedance matching is achieved different ways.
At least i want to believe ear drums being flesh vibrate differently than non organic materials, cells squeeze and contract. The shape of the ear drum is different and the electric signal in the human body is different than electronic devices. It's just a tiny tiny amount in a human. higher voltages like outside the body change and shape the sound a bit or cause distortions of certain wavelengths of the sound. Just my general idea. I had an ex girlfriend who had a wind up shortwave radio and if using it wound up instead of plugged in to AC or battery she could hold a signal on to a weak station. And no matter the power of the other stations there was less static and distortions on easy to get broadcast or hard to get broadcast. This was just a pocket radio. The flow of electricity is different between those method ac vs dc. Was the kind that winded down as you use it. Power is more stable during wind up or something. I could be a little bit wrong on the radio part because i would have to have my ex girlfriend show me again and no way am i going to go talk to her after over 15 years.
I can’t imagine what it is reliable enough for.
Apparently it's good with knots.
Years ago, I was ripped to shreds for saying AI would be a disaster.
Years ago, I was ripped to shreds for saying Elon Musk will be a disaster.
it's not 'ai', it's just a poorly trained voice recognition system that's trying to decipher any random person's voice. voice rec has a difficult-enough time when trained on a single person in a professional setting (lawyer, doctor, etc)--which is work we used to do here. it's going to absolutely fail in a 'drive thru' environment.
it's not 'ai', it's just a poorly trained voice recognition system that's trying to decipher any random person's voice.
I’m baffled that you can say “It’s not ‘AI,’ it’s a machine learning powered speech to text system” with a straight face.
Even if we were to agree that ML-powered speech to text isn’t AI (and I don’t agree to that premise, for the record), there’s still the matter of processing the transcription to transform it into something that can be understood by the point of sale system - aka natural language processing. And while that NLP could be implemented without use of an LLM, given LLM’s current level of hype and the ease with which they can be shoved into any given product, I wouldn’t bet on Taco Bell execs approving such an approach, much less asking for it.
And none of that is AI, if we use the term in a way that's useful and stop speaking in salesspeak. Machine learning algorythms, LLMs, all of that isn't AI in any meaningful sense of the word. It's all semantics of course, but the more sam altmans of the world are trying to blurry the line between intelligence and an algorythm that can identify a picture of hotdog, the more we kinda need to be stickers for the proper terminology. It was kinda cute at the beginning of this crazy cycle, but now when megacorpos are demanding all your data and putting their half-baked chatbots into everything, it's not cute anymore.
"It's not AI, it's just <multiple things that all fall under the category of Artificial Intelligence>".
AI is a huge field of computer science. It's not the one tiny narrow definition of artificial general intelligence like HAL 9000 or Skynet or Detroit Become Human.
It's not AI unless it's running on a cluster of H200s. Anything else is just sparkling text prediction.
This is not AI failing to do an easy job. This is "unskilled" labor doing complex and demanding work that cannot be duplicated by trillion dollar software.
I mean, unskilled just means minimal extra training is needed, not that it's not complicated. Actual non-complicated jobs were automated last century in the West.
Tbh this is an incredibly easy fix, either cap the number of waters someone can order in software or have an override where a human takes over if an order is suspicious, there's not an infinite number of ways to fuck with this.
Capping waters fixes that one specific issue but not the problem.
A suspicious order isn't easy to define and no person who has ever participated in software development would underestimate the infinite ways a User can break software.
The point is that loopholes in software will always exist that lead to unexpected outcomes.
that's what happens 99% of the time. It's kinda been a trend on the anti clanker side of TikTok, just order a large amount of stuff so a human takes over and actually helps you
Why can't a trillion dollar AI say "Sir, that's not reasonable"?
It actually crashed, per the article. Presumably because it failed a sanity check.