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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

#211

Post by InitialLastName »

cm2187 wrote: post #195
giancarlostoro wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch panels seem to be way better than trying to figure out how to speak in "Robot English" instead of just pushing buttons that do what you mean (mostly) without fail. Also some people who take your order are rude and make whats just supposed to be a convenient grab for food into an awful experience.

Seems to be easily solvable with an app on your phone, you order as you queue and by the time you reach the counter you already paid.

Given that this is a drivethrough we're discussing, I'd love to not have more things to encourage people to use their phones while operating heavy machinery.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #105
zanny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by giancarlostoro »

InitialLastName wrote: post #211
cm2187 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be easily solvable with an app on your phone, you order as you queue and by the time you reach the counter you already paid.

Given that this is a drivethrough we're discussing, I'd love to not have more things to encourage people to use their phones while operating heavy machinery.

The way some of these places do it is you park at a pick up spot (I remember Chick-fil-a doing this). So you order before you go pick up the food. Usually while at a grocery store, or have a friend order for you.

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

#216

Post by mattkrause »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #109
mattkrause wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re totally different domains. McDonald’s orders don’t have the crazy branching structure of Go, but they also aren’t nearly so self-contained.

How is this not a perfect example of a self-contained problem? There are only so many items on the manu. Each can only be prepared in so many different ways, with so many different ingredients. Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News,…

If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate.

On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.”

It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.

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

#217

Post by Spooky23 »

cbdumas wrote: post #25
Spooky23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

This may be my old man moment.

I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever.

I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.

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

#218

Post by delfinom »

bhouston wrote: post #135
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…

Robots are so much high maintenance than just touch panels and voice rec. Thus while it is a good idea the hurtles are much higher to get a positive ROI.

As a guy that maintains robots at a factory. They are literally a 1 hour side task once a month. The robot arms basically only needed a rebuild once in 15 years. The tooling is the only thing that goes bad and needs replacing every month and it's designed such that only a small part of the tooling needs replacement.

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

#219

Post by delfinom »

mattferderer wrote: post #106
fma wrote: post #101

I've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering.

I believe they experimented with this in the late 90's early 00's. I recall seeing job ads for rural remote workers doing exactly this kind of work. You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.

>You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.

Hah. Low wages yes, but not Indian low wages. Profit trumps all.

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

#220

Post by dagw »

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.

Most Burger Kings here in Sweden have touchscreen ordering and I hardly see anyone using the register any more. Personally I find it such a far superior experience.
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