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Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
Restaurant servers will still exist at the higher-end, much like chauffeurs do today. But most people won't be driving their cars and a human won't be taking burger orders or grilling the patty.
I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
You're thinking short-term. What are the odds the food service industry will employ humans to take mass-market food orders in 10 years? Restaurant servers will still exist at the higher-end, much like chauffeurs do today. But most people won't be driving their cars and a human won't be taking burger orders or grilling the patty.
I think we are going to have another “AI” winter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc
There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.
Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.
Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu... @dang can we get the URL changed?
That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight.
Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's.
Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu... @dang can we get the URL changed?
Yeah. That's a much better article. They're buying a company to work on it. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example. I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxe…
This won't go well.
Next they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The jan…
In Europe most McDs have kiosks inside them... make it weatherproof / stick a roof over it, done.