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Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

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Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#41

Post by akerl_ »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #26
akerl_ wrote: post #16

I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end. There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.

The apps that are deliberately designed to lure you in with deals/coupons so that they can more accurately track you and likely sell this data to data brokers? I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.

I said mobile ordering and you transmogrified it to “apps”, but I’ll play along with the strawman.

Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#42

Post by sneak »

bluedino wrote: post #25
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t pay in cash via an app. An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia. Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.

Buy a gift card across the street at CVS. Literally had to do that before. I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.

You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. Additionally, the ability to pay in cash isn’t needed for buying coffee, it’s needed for paying for legal defense, publishing, transport, and a bunch of other things. The issue isn’t that Starbucks is cashless; the issue is that when all of society goes cashless (because places like Starbucks did) then we are all capital-f Fucked.

Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#43

Post by anywhichway »

jameslk wrote: post #15

When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)

I feel like we watched different videos.. Seemed like the AI (or other monitoring system) recognized a problem with the 18000 cups of water order and quickly transitioned to a real human. That instance looked pretty production ready to me.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#44

Post by smelendez »

stephenlindauer wrote: post #29
nickthegreek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is installing tracking fast food mobile apps, creating accounts, giving emails, and even enabling notifications. Another capitalistic hellscape flimsly masquerading as a great deal for you.

Different folks have different levels of acceptable risk. I generally agree, and won’t install an app for every single one-time purchase, but I eat a lot of Taco Bell. The app makes sense for me. Many other companies also have web interfaces so you don’t NEED to install an app. (Many restaurants/bars that have a Qr Code on the table act this way.)

Yeah, and at least on iPhone you can limit location tracking to when you're in the app and disable notifications. My email address isn't particularly secret, nor is the fact that I grab a coffee and an Egg McMuffin every now and then.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#45

Post by akerl_ »

sneak wrote: post #39
akerl_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.

Most people are, because they don’t realize that when all transactions must be done without privacy and only at the pleasure of the state, the free society that you have come to take for granted will cease to exist. I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago: https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...

That’s certainly a possibility. But no, I don’t think a lack of cash will cause society as I know it to cease to exist.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#46

Post by bigstrat2003 »

akerl_ wrote: post #16

I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end. There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.

It's way more effort to order with a phone app than to just roll up and tell someone what I want. That's all there is to it, really.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#47

Post by [deleted] »

eco wrote: post #14
josephwegner wrote: post #5

I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experi…

I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy. A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive wi…

[deleted]

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#49

Post by Zagreus2142 »

sneak wrote: post #23
jameslk wrote: post #15

When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)

This is solved easily by one additional sanity check API call to a different AI. I’m not sure why people think these bugs are like, complete showstopper insurmountable things. It’s a quick fix.

Taco Bell knows and controls it's own menu and the valid options are already directly encoded in their POS system, including purchase limits. Why would you call out to a different non-deterministic model instead of validating against the complete and deterministic data you have? Taco Bell can afford 1-2 engineers to manage that

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#50

Post by smnplk »

joshdavham wrote: post #35

So AI will replace software engineers but not fast food workers because that work is too complex for AI?

They were smart and didn't upload their process to github, didn't write any books or tutorials on fast food ordering process. So AI could't learn the craft. ;)
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