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McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

bbc.com

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Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#91

Post by behringer »

neom wrote: post #45
cbdumas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?

The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.

Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#92

Post by LanceH »

rangibaby wrote: post #72
hirundo wrote: post #15

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…

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#94

Post by judge2020 »

pmart123 wrote: post #46
cbdumas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?

Panera has a great touchscreen experience.

Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register.

Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#95

Post by judge2020 »

cavisne wrote: post #70

I wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered). Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.

I imagine some old systems from before the dawn of big data don't.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#96

Post by judge2020 »

devoply wrote: post #16
claar wrote: post #6

Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu... @dang can we get the URL changed?

Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff. I would prefer a human taking my order. Automating this stuff has 2 benefits, reduced costs while still selling over-priced sub-par food. Second, being able to upsell using video and voice technology. Are either of these good for consumers, not particularly. Nor are they good for employees. They are potentially good for management and ownership. That's pretty sad outcome to all…

> Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff.

This article is the source of the HN-linked BBC article.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#97

Post by jrjdjdhhedh »

cbhl wrote: post #53
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process…

What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.

How myopic for you have to be to not just wonder why a mcd app in Japan would not be expected to work in the us but to say that's how it should be? All the complex shit that goes into a company like mcd in a single country and you expect what you're expecting?

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#98

Post by zanny »

rangibaby wrote: post #72
hirundo wrote: post #15

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…

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore.

In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#99

Post by all_blue_chucks »

Spooky23 wrote: post #19
hirundo wrote: post #15

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…

Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.

The end game is to remove all drive throughs and fast food joints, and replace them with drone and/or pneumatic tube food delivery. I'm hoping for the tubes.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#100

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tracker1 wrote: post #68
adventured wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who only orders cheese on burgers (although with the buns), it means they only want the sandwich to consist of the meat and cheese (hold all other toppings; so if it would normally come with pickles, hold those). If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all t…

Exactly.. if you don't say that part, they'll usually remove the cheese too. Similar on experimenting on how to order. "Diet Dr. Pepper" is another hard one, often you will get regular, or diet coke. The dipping cup ranch, for those curious is because the ranch dressing has a lot of added sugar/carbs and the dipping cups are like 1.5g each. Severely diabetic and nearly 0 carb has been the only effective way to manage…

I worked McDonald’s drive thru as a kid and plain cheese burger meant bun cheese and meat. They even had a key for it on the POS, it was completely standardized.

Of course, it’s always possible some new employee would mess it up, or anything on your order actually. With turn over so high, there was no shortage of such errors.

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