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Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

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Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#51

Post by Jordan-117 »

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…

That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#52

Post by jameslk »

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.

It seems so, and yet here we are

There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#53

Post by ggghgcdd »

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)

[flagged]

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#54

Post by akerl_ »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #46
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.

It seems hard to have empirical data here, but even just the parallelization of it seems to bias in favor of mobile ordering.

Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.

If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#55

Post by jameslk »

anywhichway wrote: post #43
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.

I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation

That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#56

Post by grishka »

akerl_ wrote: post #36
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.

I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.

What about international travelers who don't have an internationally accepted payment card because their home country was mostly isolated from the banking system in a mostly futile attempt to punish its government?

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#58

Post by hackable_sand »

joshdavham wrote: post #35

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

Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.

Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.

But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).

Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.

What is that worth?

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#59

Post by akerl_ »

grishka wrote: post #56
akerl_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.

What about international travelers who don't have an internationally accepted payment card because their home country was mostly isolated from the banking system in a mostly futile attempt to punish its government?

I don't think cash is saving anyone from the knock-on effects of international sanctions on their citizens. The same people who don't have access to a Visa because they're citizens of a sanctioned country aren't in a position to easily turn their local currency into USD, and the ways they'd start to earn money outside of the sanction bubble overlap the ways they'd get an internationally accepted payment card.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#60

Post by toofy »

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 number of places that beg me to install an app is ridiculous. if i installed an app from every single place that begs me to my phone would probably shut down in protest from the thousands of apps i’d have cluttered everywhere.

from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.

just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.

honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.

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