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McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Why would they in the first place? What's wrong with a touchscreen menu to take an order?
Then, of course, I'm not sure such places fundamentally even need human personnel other than maintenance techs. Standard ingredients, prepackaged I think, standard hardware to cook, standard everything. It can just be a huge burger-selling machine with no human in sight.
I personally HATE those places where you walk inside and you need to use the stupid touchscreen. I've asked someone to take my order, they say no. So I get in the car and go to the drive through where you still get a person taking your order.
Not the OP but for me it takes like 4 times longer to use the tuch screen. Find the button for what i want. Do you want to super-sized? Do you want fries with that? How are you paying today? Blah blah blah whereas with the counter its me saying one sentence and them pushing 2 buttons.
I would use the touchscreen in that case.
Ooof not sure why you got downvoted.
I'm starting to think people who hate ordering from a touchscreen really see talking to a cashier as fulfilling social needs.
Nope, just faster and easier.
If there are 4 people in line for a cashier, take away the cashier and you still have 4 people in line waiting for the kiosk.... And it will take longer because ordering from the kiosk is a slow process.
Its because those touch screens have clunky UI and are slow if they made it simple and straightforward instead of a question for every page it would be as fast if not faster than a person ordering at a register. Most PoS systems are touch screen nowadays so literally all your doing instead of putting in the options in yourself is telling someone else what to put in. They also do it hundreds of times an hour so they are way faster that someone whos only used a kiosk a few times
Maybe stand a foot further apart from the screen? That way you'll be able to see the button better.
What you hate about it are the constant upsell shenanigans, not the touchscreen per se. I dislike those, too, but I reckon the human staff are also trying to sell more than you want?
He's looking to chat up some young ladies before he has to go back home to the old ball'n'chain...
What if there are physical buttons, like with ATMs?
Touchscreen? That's old, we can't use that in our marketing, even BK has those. We need something new, fuckin do I care if it works????
They could advertise actually usable physical buttons ...
Those would stop working because local scoundrels would stick their chewing gums in them
With hercons without place to stick anything. Like a blister. You've seen such buttons.
Those could work if it wasn’t for the local perverts blocking them 24/7 because twiddling them feels a bit like twiddling a robot’s nipples
Never seen that. One can make them less like nipples and more like a depressable square area on a wall.
If it wasn’t for those Medellin kids who stole all the square shapes from the wall button factory, I tells ya
Lots of their drive thrus use a person to take the order, and at a busy drive thru this becomes a dedicated person or persons just to take orders. If they can flip it to AI then they could open more lanes and reduce staff. Problem is that a skilled person is going to be better than AI over a shitty audio system, look at how Alexa and Siri struggle even when they have an optimized reception setup than the crappy setup you have at a drive thru with the person sitting inside their car, with music on and so on.
Maybe voice interfaces are simply a fundamentally flawed idea. If one can extend a hand to take the package with the food, they can also push a few buttons. If those buttons are with hercons or such, they'll even last longer than consumer-grade touchscreens.
Of course it's easier when a human takes the order. But then if the cost of N screens with physical buttons is equal to that, one can make their order, say, N/2 times slower without any hurry and, well, the throughput should be higher still.
For drive thrus - that'd be M lanes with such terminals and a bit slower than M lanes with people. So - depends on how the cost of asphalt and space and people and terminals work economically.
What's definitely idiotic is to think one can replace a human with an "AI" without losing in efficiency. But then again, maybe it's worth it.
While I like the ideas with screens, and fixed buttons even more so, they haven't gone with them despite the tech being available for a considerable time. I do wonder if its mostly down to how people use them rather than a limitation of the tech itself. Watch how many people nearly swipe or even do scrape exit parking machines, even simple parking meters stop working, people struggle to use the ones inside, then add in weather damage/proofing and vandalism and I would guess thats a big part of it. As its often a closed queue system any problem becomes a major issue almost instantly.
That applies to "AI" just as well.
"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"
"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"
"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"
Exactly