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Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

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Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#131

Post by kotaKat »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #33
PapaPalpatine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard someone describe drive-thrus as a “famously bad experience.”

There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order. Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly). Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster. I’d pu…

I got trapped in a Burger King drive thru for half an hour. Car parked in front of me, cars stuck behind me, concrete barrier on the right keeping me from pulling away.

No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.

At least my bank won the chargeback.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#132

Post by rsynnott »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #2

Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing. Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem. What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car? Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!

As far as I can tell, _most_ recent examples of 'AI' inflicted on the public have been rolled out on scale without testing, or at least the results of testing have been ignored. It's generally incredibly shoddy stuff.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#133

Post by mrweasel »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #33
PapaPalpatine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard someone describe drive-thrus as a “famously bad experience.”

There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order. Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly). Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster. I’d pu…

Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order, made me think that maybe the drive thru isn't that great of an idea during rush hours. The staff needs to handle orders in a very specific sequence, to get the cars moving, meaning that they'll need to priorities drive thru orders. Wolt/DoorDash impose the same problem to an extend. I've notice that orders from in restaurant customers is frequently seems to be de-prioritized to get the drive thru line moving or to get the deliveries out.

It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#135

Post by mapt »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #51
eco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big box retail here.

One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".

That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#136

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

dangus wrote: post #97
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #2

Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing. Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem. What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car? Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!

500 stores isn't really "scale," that's only about 6% of their locations. To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this. I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language. I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued…

If they want to do automated voice ordering, then using multiple choice A/B/C/cancel (with feedback on screen) would seem less error prone than LLM open ended natural language with some kind of intent interpretation.

Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#137

Post by shakna »

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.

If Anthropic couldn't achieve that with Project Vend [0], why do you seem to think that everyone else could?

> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.

> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-becam...

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#138

Post by grues-dinner »

MangoToupe wrote: post #120
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order. Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly). Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster. I’d pu…

I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of gett…

> inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee

My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.

Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.

McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#139

Post by sokoloff »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #2

Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing. Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem. What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car? Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!

I would wager a lot of money that they did test it at an even smaller scale before expanding the testing program to these 500 locations.

Re: Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

#140

Post by macintux »

toofy wrote: post #60
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 t…

I tried to use a coupon recently at a major drug store chain, one they had just given me for getting vaccinated, and despite the fact that the coupon said nothing about this requirement, they wouldn’t take it without also using a frequent shopper card.

At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.

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