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Robotics AI

More AI is Coming to Fast-Food Restaurant Drive-Through Lanes (cnn.com) 103

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Over the past few years, restaurants from White Castle to Wendy's have been investing in artificial intelligence tech for drive-thrus... [E]fforts have ramped up recently, with two announcements in May. CKE Restaurants (owner of Hardee's and Carl's Jr.) said it will roll out AI ordering capability more broadly after a successful pilot. Soon after, Wendy's said it had expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to include an AI ordering tool at the drive-thru. The chain is piloting the program in Columbus, Ohio this month.
Fast food restaurants "say it's a way to ease the burden placed on overworked employees, and a solution to bogged down drive-thrus overwhelmed by a surge of customers," according to the article. "But customers — and workers — may not be thrilled with the technology... " Frustrated customers have already documented cases of AI getting their orders wrong, and experts warn the noisy drive-thru is a challenging environment for the technology. And AI may swipe hours or even entire jobs away from fast-food workers... Out of ten orders placed by customers at an Indiana White Castle that uses AI in its drive-thru, three people asked to speak with a human employee, because of either an error or a desire to simply talk to a person, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.

That said, AI inherently improves as it collects more data. The experience may improve after tools take more orders and learn to better recognize voices.

For companies, a hiccup-y start seems to be well worth the potential boost to sales. One of the main benefits of using AI in the drive-thru is that it upsells relentlessly — leading customers to spend more, according to Presto Automation, an AI company that works with restaurants and has partnered with CKE... Some analysts are similarly bullish. "We believe that AI voice recognition and digital only lanes could speed up the average drive through service time by at least 20-30%," analysts wrote in a Bernstein Research note published in March. "We expect AI to augment the competitive advantages of restaurants with digital culture."

Short-staffed restaurants may see AI as a way to fill in the gaps... Some restaurants are still struggling to find staff. Meanwhile, dining trends have changed. The pandemic sent customers to drive-thrus in droves and some have kept the habit, contributing to slower drive-thru times.

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More AI is Coming to Fast-Food Restaurant Drive-Through Lanes

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    If you don't like flipping burgers then get a better job!

    Ok.

    Hey why is this restaurant empty?

    • Right? Since the business can't afford the cost of operating - that includes labor - they should go out of business.
      • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @02:51PM (#63611010)

        https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

        McDonald's workers in the US make a median hourly wage of $9.15, according a New York Times report citing PayScale, a firm that tracks compensation data. McDonald's does not provide data on its wages.

        "In Denmark, McDonald's workers over the age of eighteen earn more than $20 an hour — they are also unionized — and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States," Finnegan writes.

        • You do realize that the article you referenced is almost a decade old?

          I live in a small college town in Wisconsin, and no one is paying that little. The local fast food places are all advertising $15/hr, and the local version of the Kwiky-mart is advertising the assistant manager position at $50,000/year.
          • And, FYI, the "minimum wage" is still $7.25/hr, which proves the uselessness of having a "minimum wage".
            • The min wage is not useless even if corrupt politicians purposely delay it from going up to a reasonable level. Oh, and the free market won't automatically raise the wage unless DESPERATE to do so. They have been; but at other times in history it was the workers who were desperate and then the wages were way too low.... but back when government worked the workers got a minimum wage since it was THEIR government not owned by businesses.

              • We have now (and for several years now) proven that the free market will pay what they have to pay to get qualified workers. The fact that NO ONE is paying only the legally required minimum proves that. And not just by a small amount; the current going rate is at least twice the official minimum wage.

                If you can't find a job that pays better than minimum wage, you're hopeless as an employee. It took me about 1 year (when I was 16-17 years old) to make more than the then-current minimum wage ($3.25, IIRC
      • And who are you to decide who should go out of business? I thought that markets ultimately decide who succeeds and who fails. Who has conferred the right to decide who should fail on you? If the restaurant cuts down expenses and improves quality, they can offer better service for the same of lower price and push the competitors out of the market. Long time ago, a guy named Ned Ludd was walking all over the UK, smashing fabric mills. It seems that Ned Ludd has acquired some new followers these days. I would

      • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @08:42PM (#63611708)

        they should go out of business

        YES. How does everyone keep forgetting this part of "free market"?

        Have we just bailed out so many folks that we forgot that capitalism has *gasp* failure in it as well? Adapt or make room for those who can, that's how that works. And the thing is, even if we didn't have a minimum wage, all things the same, anyone think people going to work the kind of job fast food brings with it for seventy cents an hour?

        I'm tired of this notion that we've got to protect businesses tooth and nail. If they cannot swim in the current market, they need to drown. That is what is wrong currently. We keep trying to delay the great purge by saving companies and we just need to let it go away and build back. CKE Restaurants is a $1.28B revenue company, they either figure it out or they are just a slumbering Titanic too slow to avoid the iceberg.

        Gosh we've got to stop shooting ourselves in the foot. Let this shit fail. We should have done it with the automakers, we should have done it with the investment banks, we should have done it with the cruise lines. We have got to put some faith back into actual free markets, otherwise we just keep propping up companies that have no business to keep running, and deny companies that could move into those cleared out niches that are vastly more agile.

        Yes, I know NOBODY wants to be the person at the helm when it all comes crashing down, but we're making it worse for ourselves when we deny free market principals just because we don't want jobless voters mad at us. The question is "where does this bailing everyone out stop?" and the answer has to be "somewhere" not "never".

        • by narcc ( 412956 )

          The problem is that we've been doing things backward. When businesses take stupid risks, we bail out the business when we should have let the business fail, and bailed out the people. (With appropriate social safety nets, this would have been effortless.) If a business was "too big to fail", meaning that it's failure would cause a widespread economic disruption, then it should have been broken up long before it became a problem.

          We need another Teddy Roosevelt.

    • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @02:53PM (#63611014)
      It is not that no one wants to work anymore. As the fast food restaurants seem to admit, they overwork their employees.
      • I am pretty sure running a fast food joint is getting more and more expensive, raising prices is difficult but will eventually have to happen and it will only be enough to do a temporary relief in a system that is creating so much new money and debt all the time, so just to stay in one place they have to do all the running they can do and to get ahead they must run twice as fast, just like Alice. We are living in a Wonderland and we are surrounded by a bunch of Tweedledums and Tweedledees who think the pro

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @01:42PM (#63610784)

    You could, I don't know, hire more people? And if you cannot get any, offer better pay and conditions? Naa, better just kill those additional jobs!

    • The problem is balancing the number of people and the customer's willingness to pay higher prices. Most every place around here (Chicago outer suburbs) is constantly hiring, with people being paid $14-20 per hour to start, and not being able to get enough people. One local restaurant closes their inside sales when they can't get enough people to keep it open during dinner hours. Others just close completely for a few days each week.

      So it's a balancing act - get enough people to BE open has started losing ou

      • by Anonymous Coward

        When gov't sets the minimum wage too high, it causes places like restaurants to hire fewer people, and then they inevitably overwork the few people they do hire. That was my experience working food and beverage in a libtard state (Oregon) vs the same job in a conservative state (Wyoming).

        Liberals often scream "just pay higher wages and hire more people." However, there is a finite upper limit to how high the restaurant can raise their prices before customers simply stop coming and the entire business collap

        • by Arethan ( 223197 )

          Bummer this chap decided to post AC, but imo it deserves some mod bump.
          Squeaky wheels like to scream about the virtues of their pet cause, but few people bother to truly research the full impact their cause will have once enacted. This is a very good example of a well intentioned initiative leading to unintended consequences with a net-negative effect.

          • No it doesn't, it's simplistic libertarian theorizing on the relationship between wages, prices, inflation and monetary supply. Things economists have studied in detail for decades.

            If this theory is so obvious then there should be a pile of studies and consensus on minimum wage and rising prices. But there isn't, not because it ha no effects, it has some but it's a huge multivariate problem and fact is we need nations with higher wages but similar prices and buying power.

            I'm gonna guess you or poster abov

            • by Arethan ( 223197 )

              it's a huge multivariate problem and fact is we need nations with higher wages but similar prices and buying power

              What you just described is called Unobtainium. You cannot add new free money supply into a closed system without also causing an inflation effect to meet it.

              I'm really unsure where this idea of "everyone is always equal regardless of their economic impact" keeps coming from, but it's really discouraging to see every time it pops itself up. Go ask mid 1970s Russia how communism worked out for them, and be sure to query about the food shortages, the forced farm-hand excursions on their youth, the wasted produ

          • In case you missed it - https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

            What jacks smirking reven said too.

            And overall wage disparity and safety net coherence are other big factors in the equation. The US is high on the first and low on the second.

            • by Arethan ( 223197 )

              Sure. Go unionize your fast food franchise store. I'm not against worker's rights at all, and living wage is indeed a real problem. Just don't be shocked if those locations start to cut staff in order to meet the wage requirements, or close due to lack of profit. The owners often have real debt, and banks don't give a fuck about the sudden change in their workers' sentiment.

              Remember, a parking lot or storage facility requires far less overhead to operate than any food producing establishment ever created to

              • > Just don't be shocked if those locations start to cut staff in order to meet the wage requirements, or close due to lack of profit. The owners often have real debt, and banks don't give a fuck about the sudden change in their workers' sentiment.

                Yeah. I agree.

                There's possibilities, but we can't expect what usually works in one economic context somewhere is going to just work in another economic context somewhere else when in fact it often doesn't.

        • by narcc ( 412956 )

          Any minimum wage under $21 an hour is effectively less than it was in the 1960's. You're full of shit.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Random361 ( 6742804 )
        Summer of 2021 I frequented a Sonic on the southside of town. Next to it was a Dominos Pizza. The Dominos Pizza had a big banner up: "Hiring delivery drivers! $18-20/hr!" It was up all summer and they constantly had staffing problems. At a Sonic a bit closer to where I was working, they had to slash their hours to 2PM-8PM for a few weeks because they had insufficient staffing, which is why I went to the one next to the base. (Teenage kids of military taking jobs next to where they live.)

        Apparently printi

        • raising minimum wage for menial jobs to $15-$18/h

          Federal Minimum Wage is still $7.25/hr

          changing the United States from a net exporter back into an importer of oil

          The US has pumped more oil this year then anytime in history. https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]

          • raising minimum wage for menial jobs to $15-$18/h

            Federal Minimum Wage is still $7.25/hr

            Federal is. I was specifically referring to places like Seattle that implemented $15/hr minimum wages.

            changing the United States from a net exporter back into an importer of oil

            The US has pumped more oil this year then anytime in history. https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]

            It is now. It wasn't during the pandemic. Then again, global demand was less.

            • raising minimum wage for menial jobs to $15-$18/h

              Federal Minimum Wage is still $7.25/hr

              Federal is. I was specifically referring to places like Seattle that implemented $15/hr minimum wages.

              (Slashdot really needs an edit function. This code base is ancient.) States are allowed to set their own wages. And in some areas cities are too. Remember the article from a few days ago about a minimum wage of $18/hr or something for delivery workers in NYC? And: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/w... [dol.gov]

              • by narcc ( 412956 )

                Slashdot really needs an edit function.

                So you can lie about what you posted after someone calls you out on your bullshit?

          • by narcc ( 412956 )

            It's amazing how simple facts completely and effortlessly destroy right-wing bullshit.

        • Cool story. In the mean time on the other side of the world we did none of that and still had many smaller shops close, still have staffing issues, and still have inflation despite not printing money.

          Maybe your causal analysis is broken.

          • Cool story. In the mean time on the other side of the world we did none of that and still had many smaller shops close, still have staffing issues, and still have inflation despite not printing money.

            Maybe your causal analysis is broken.

            Smaller shops closed because of the economic disruption caused by the COVID hysteria. Worldwide inflation has been affected by the idea of the "petro-dollar." When the dollar devalues, it has ripple effects. (One could argue this is why the idea of a "global reserve currency" is a really bad idea.)

        • Hold on a minute here, you’re telling me I could have retired with that $2000 that Trump gave everyone? I’ve been a sucker all this time.

          If you make more on unemployment than your job, the problem isn’t unemployment.

          • Hold on a minute here, you’re telling me I could have retired with that $2000 that Trump gave everyone? I’ve been a sucker all this time.

            If you make more on unemployment than your job, the problem isn’t unemployment.

            No, I'm talking more about the unemployment extensions, loan payment pauses (and Biden proposes cancellation), stimulus packages, and all the rest. For some people, maybe most, if you can go out and work 40 hours a week and make $50,000 or you can get $40,000 by doing nothing, the $40,000 option is more appealing. If you want more money you do some Internet selling or something and never claim it. When those things end then people are forced to go back to work. In some cases, though, there are no jobs left

            • I really don't think you understand how unemployment pay is calculated.

            • "work 40 hours a week and make $50,000 or you can get $40,000 by doing nothing"

              First, you couldn't EVER get that much, let alone get that now. Not only is there absolute limits for unemployment benefits there are also limits relative to your previous earnings.

              Second, you don't get unemployment benefits for doing nothing, you have to be a) seeking work, in b) your specific geographic area. I've had applications to a businesses 40 minutes away and an interview in a different state both rejected as evidence of

    • It really is not that easy. It is a shitty job, and once someone can get a less shitty job they will-- even if it pays marginally less.

    • I don't use self-checkout at the grocery store. The automation allows companies to low-ball wages and to automate people out of jobs. I refuse to support this trend. Using cost as the only metric in a business does not lead to a greater good. When I go to the store or one of these AI restaurants, I will always ask for a person to do this. If nobody uses the automation, they will be forced to hire people and probably raise prices as well, but that is OK.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Same here. Unless and until the problem of wealth distribution in society gets solved in a sane way, I will continue with that. I expect that will be indefinitely, because there are always too many fuckers that need more even when they already have a lot more than their fair share.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I don't use self-checkout at the grocery store. The automation allows companies to low-ball wages and to automate people out of jobs. I refuse to support this trend. Using cost as the only metric in a business does not lead to a greater good. When I go to the store or one of these AI restaurants, I will always ask for a person to do this. If nobody uses the automation, they will be forced to hire people and probably raise prices as well, but that is OK.

        I do, but that's because they have more people manning

      • "If nobody uses the automation, they will be forced to hire people and probably raise prices as well"

        No, they won't hire more people. You'll just wait longer in line because if there was some alternative store you'd already be using it.

    • by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @02:26PM (#63610930) Homepage Journal

      I was thirsty after an afternoon of working on my project, decided to stop at the drive through and get a diet coke from the nearby Carl Jr's. They wanted $4.85 for a medium soda. I cancelled my order and drove through to a nearby gas station and got a soda for a $1.50.
       
      Additionally, I was used to paying $8, then $10 for two mediocre food items (2 x jr cheeseburger or whatever) in california it's about $12-16 now
       
      Most fast food employees tell me there's only 2-3 employees in the store most times, especially when the drive through lane is wrapped around the building. Most of these places are paying $18-22/hr which is what fabrication shops pay a welder with 1+ years of experience.

      • Most of these places are paying $18-22/hr which is what fabrication shops pay a welder with 1+ years of experience.

        Yeah, those guys are getting taken advantage of pretty badly given what customers are typically charged for welding services. If you want to make good money as a welder you seem to basically have to be more highly educated so you can get the jobs to do the fancy stuff, or work for yourself.

        • This is a big part of the reason why folks who work in trades tend to fall on the more conservative side of the fence. Fast food and retail workers get their $15+ hour salaries, and tradespeople who were already making $20+/hr don't see any raise. Then along comes inflation, raising the cost of damn near everything.

          It ends up mostly being a wash for people working the low-end jobs, but everybody else gets screwed (unless you're earning enough that above a certain point it's all hookers and blow money anyw

          • Thing is, the educated and uneducated alike are being screwed over by the same people. The smart thing is to unite, not to get mad at each other.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            So the tradespeople feel underpaid and instead of getting mad at say, their employer, they blame other workers? And vote the party that wants to depress wages and strip services? I guess that describes conservatives.

            Conservatism; don't bother to improve things but focus on punishing the people you've been told deserve it. Those dastardly fast food workers! How dare they make more money!

        • One of the very small perks trump gave out was substantial tax breaks for small businesses like one man mobile welding operations where your gross income is under $300k

      • Additionally, I was used to paying $8, then $10 for two mediocre food items (2 x jr cheeseburger or whatever) in california it's about $12-16 now

        That's about what fast food costs in Florida too, but jobs don't pay California wages here. Of course, there's no state income tax and you can legally drive around in a barely-functional jalopy that belches smoke, so it all evens out I guess.

      • "They wanted $4.85 for a medium soda. I cancelled my order and drove through to a nearby gas station and got a soda for a $1.50."

        You failed to account for the value of your free time that you spent to save $3.35 in cash. You likely came out negative.

    • They tried that. People don't want to work. So what can you do?

    • I doubt it's really about a lack of workers. Fast food restaurants have been pushing very hard lately to get you to install their apps on your phone. Making the in-person ordering process as miserable as possible is a great way to force people to switch to ordering through the app. Once they've infested your phone, they're then able to collect all that delicious telemetry data (didn't Uber just recently say "We know where you're going any we know what you've eaten."?), and can send you notification spam [getyarn.io]

    • A lot of the people who have risen to that level of decision-making in big organizations have a general hatred of people. They do the eliminating with glee.

      Much has been said of the prevalence of psychopathy as you move up the food chain. But picture this: not only are there psychopaths, but they're surrounded by other psychopaths, each one of them trying to fuck over all the rest. Wouldn't you hate people too, if that was your world?

      It seems likely hatred of people generally was the motivation behind the g

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, it is not genetic. But carefully screening for psychos before they are allowed to get any "leadership" position would certainly be a good thing. In fact it may determine whether the human race has a future.

    • In Australia they didnâ(TM)t higher more staff McDonaldâ(TM)s have replaced the ordering staff with self serve kiosks and the MyMaccaâ(TM)s app personally I havenâ(TM)t had an error in my orders since this started and I get annoyed with people who donâ(TM)t use the app in drive thru
    • At $15 / hour?
      Fuck that. I'm already paying nearly $10 for breakfast at McDonald's, which is bullshit.

      No, I'll happily deal with an ever-improving ai infrastructure is it means my meals are less than $7.
      And all the skill-less people who made shitty life choices can add "demanding $15/hr for a no skill job easily replaced by automaton" to that list.

  • Food preparation and cleanup is a really boring job. I can understand coming up with new recipes and stuff like that .. but reporting the same over and over. It should be against the law to make someone do that. Robots should be doing all repetitive tasks. We need to suspend military, roads, and R&D into everything else and instead spend $100 billion in tax money on developing robots for cleaning tasks and food cooking/prep tasks. It's worth it.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @01:55PM (#63610824)
      100 billion isn't all that much money we spend eight times that on the military every year. Never mind the 50 trillion pocketed by the 1% over the last 40 years (look it up).

      The problem is we are very much a society that believes in, if you don't work you don't eat. Nothing infuriates a voter more than the concept of somebody of a decent life who is working fewer hours than them. That's why guys like Elon Musk pretend to work 100 hours a week while somehow able to spend all day on Twitter or going to parties.
      • If you are going to pass out free food, then I want free food too. I'm not working a job and paying taxes just to not get any services.

        If we go along with your line of thinking, provide everyone with a home, food, electricity and running water, there is almost nothing left to work for. In California, if you give me all that and I can then go steal with impunity from Target, I would also have free entertainment!

        Offering a better life if you work is a pretty good deal. That's why I work so hard. To provide *m

        • If we go along with your line of thinking, provide everyone with a home, food, electricity and running water, there is almost nothing left to work for.

          In other words, you have already been conditioned properly to accept you don't earn more than you need to afford the bare minimum for survival.

          • No I work as hard as I need to enjoy life at the spot I'm at. If I wanted more then what I have already, I would go back to school and get more education and a better job. I don't do that because I'm happy with how my work/life balance is already.

            It's not the government's job to make my life better. That's on me. If I want to take more lavish vacations or drive a 100k car or buy a boat, I should go earn it. I don't really desire those things or at least not for the amount of work and effort it would take to

            • If I want to take more lavish vacations or drive a 100k car or buy a boat, I should go earn it.

              So you DO know there is something aside of

              a home, food, electricity and running water

              that people would want to work for. Why do you claim there ain't such a thing and people wouldn't want to work for it? Just because you don't doesn't mean people wouldn't.

        • How many retired people do you know who go rob Target? Besides, I assume the proposal would be everyone has access to a 150 square foot shelter, and bland food. Electricity can be minimal too, maybe a kilowatt a day what does a one square meter solar panel provide? It's enough that it keeps you sustained but pretty sure most humans would want to live in a larger house and therefore do your precious work.

          • If the vast majority of us stop working, society would collapse. There isn't enough resources for us all to live high on the hog. As it is, Western people are already living beyond the means of the world in general. Most of the rest of the world is playing catchup and it's pretty obvious we can't all live upper middle class Western lifestyles.

      • Nothing infuriates a voter more than the concept of somebody of a decent life who is working fewer hours than them.

        People literally worship celebrities who are in a recording studio for a few hours every few years and spend the remainder of their time partying. The unwashed masses are totally okay with being a wealthy sloth so long as it was accomplished within the established rules of capitalism. Sat in your parents' basement and got rich selling dumb ape NFTs? Great! Launched a scented candle company using some money your multi-millionaire dad gave you? Awesome!

        The common thread here is that the money was all tra

        • It's the concept of forced wealth redistribution that conservatives have a problem with. If you find a way to get rich while sitting on your ass all day, which doesn't involve collecting a check from Uncle Sam, they'll pat you on the back and say "job well done."

          They're happy to support increases in military budgets, which translates in part to a lot of people getting paid for a lot of chair warming. They also then like to complain about high taxes.

    • So you're saying boring jobs should be illegal? Is this a troll post?

  • i would like to see this driver-side technology improved to the point where it can engage and keep the person on the driver's side amused, thus distracting them from the roving killbot that will approach from the passenger side and eliminate everyone who's so intent on getting their favorite biscuit that they queue up their vehicles out into the travel lanes of the roadway, blocking traffic.

  • Rotisserie Chicken (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday June 17, 2023 @01:50PM (#63610804) Homepage Journal

    You're better off in almost every way to stop at a grocery store and grabbing a rotisserie chicken with sides and a drink to your liking.

    Usually faster too.

    • You're better off in almost every way to stop at a grocery store and grabbing a rotisserie chicken with sides and a drink to your liking.

      Which doesn't really help if you were craving a hamburger, though.

  • Every time somebody came through in a diesel pickup that was it. I made my best guess if you order and then fixed it when they got to the window because it was always wrong. Occasionally someone was smart enough to realize they needed to turn their damned engine off. We weren't supposed to tell him to do that. But you had zero chance of hearing what they were saying.

    I don't think it matters though because the average fast food diner nowadays is hitting the place because they're working a second or third
  • Yes if you want investors to line up to give you "stupid money" all you have to do is say AI, Quantum, Blockchain, Crypto, Synergy, Disruption, or Cloud.

    In this case a "Wendy's drive through" that uses speech to text to put in an order has NOTHING to do with any of those, although they spin it that way.

    Zoom also now says they have AI for their "collaborative meetings IQ". Yeah, that's like a conference call with notes from speech to text. Not AI.

    Pardon me while I go disrupt your blockchain of cloud crypto

    • by hazem ( 472289 )

      Zoom also now says they have AI for their "collaborative meetings IQ". Yeah, that's like a conference call with notes from speech to text. Not AI.

      Indeed. I once took an AI class and learned a lot. However the prof said something that really stuck with me: what we call AI today is simply the algorithm for doing a thing tomorrow.

      As an example, A* used to be considered "AI" in its time and it's a great algorithm for finding a path through a network with variable weights using heuristics. It's probably still what drives your driving directions on the maps application of your choice. But it would hardly be considered "AI" today.

      The problem with "AI"

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @02:07PM (#63610864)
    --- Fast food restaurants "say it's a way to ease the burden placed on overworked employees..." --- So fast food restaurants seem to admit they overwork employees?
    • Basically all labour / service jobs are overworking. You don't get to have a random coffee break, you get the bare minimum. In much of the world the bare minimum is exhausting. In the USA the bare minimum is "fuck you, get back to work" because worker protections range from a joke to being non existent at all and you've bread a culture of work above all else.

      You will always be over worked. It's cultural. In a country where the average vacation vacation days are 11 days a year, somehow the average unused one

  • When I know I'm talking to an automatic system on the phone I just repeatedly state "Human" over and over and the system eventually gives up and connects me to a human. I wonder if this works through the fast food lanes? If it does how much do you want to bet you'll start getting connected to humans in India or elsewhere to take your order. Imagine the horror an Indian worker would have to endure while we Americans order our juicy cow sandwiches over and over again. Mmmm, cow.

  • The price of fast food has gone up a lot over the years. At this point, I have to REALLY want junk food to go eat there. It's not good for you. It's over priced. Now it won't even support the local economy with jobs. Pretty much no reason to eat there anymore.

  • Hello valued customer. Would you like more 5-30 weight oil on your salad? We have a special today on crispy nuts and bolts. I am an AI trained on the best available SAE data. Try our new turbocharged french fries.
  • Should be obvious enough.

    It might, if the people running the system make it improve but theres nothing inherent in it.

    Anyway, a touchscreen and a menu works.. Dunno how this is supposed to actually increase the throughput either.

  • It will be interesting to see how well an AI handles accents, they couldn't be worse than some humans. I recall in a small town in the USA trying to order a cheeseburger, fries and and milkshake with my New Zealand accent. I had to repeat the word cheeseburger several times. Sure I know an unfamiliar accent can make things harder, but I was left wondering how many things on the menu I could be ordering that sound like that word? I had less trouble placing the same order Ukraine and China.

    I guess if t
  • by Mozai ( 3547 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @04:21PM (#63611202) Homepage
    "One of the main benefits of using AI in the drive-thru is that it upsells relentlessly..." So now it's nobody's fault when my order is mistaken, the prices are mistaken, or it won't let me continue unless I agree to purchase something I didn't want. Jesus wept.
  • "Why do you think you feel like a burger and two coffees?"
  • Voice AI for to expedite mobile order acceptance at drive-thru would be nice.

    Hi Grimace: Mobile Order AX69 for Bob
    or ask for help if there is something more complicated going on.

    Often there is only one order taker for a dual lane drive thru. This would speed things up a bit.

  • I'm surprised nobody has posted this yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Get your extra big-ass fries here!

    Meanwhile, I'll keep going to restaurants & cafés & getting served at my table by a human waiter who isn't pathologically cheerful & positive because they're dependent on tips & live in fear of being fired without just cause on the whim of their boss or because of a hissy-fit by a spoilt brat-like customer. You know, just a regular person serving you who may be cheerful or m
  • Given the kind of service you usually get, an AI could hardly do worse.
  • It's not surprising, honestly, that's where everything is headed these days. With that said, I still find it a little bit odd seeing the robot cleaning machines that go around Walmart cleaning the floors.
  • It's sad to see AI creeping into various industries, and it seems that business owners are more interested in replacing workers than easing their burdens. This is especially troubling given the high and ever-increasing unemployment rate. I studied this topic for a college project with research papers on this external link [studydriver.com], and some of the authors support my thoughts. Instead of looking for ways to ease the burden on employees, businesses are turning to technology to replace them, and while there are claims

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