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McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
- aaron695 7y ago> McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs So that's a lie. https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli-founded-Apprente-to-accelerate-drive-thrus-601292 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli... Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out? Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out? https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistance-journey-of-a-fastfood-order.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan... Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when. This article contributes nothing. All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> "Their job is to be fast on the mouse -- that's their job," Ugh. No wonder why the project failed. It treated people as tools instead of people. There should be a custom board of keys. The more common the order item, the bigger the button to press.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order. I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
- jsharf 7y agoI'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct. Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans.
- bluedino 7y agoHave you seen people order? I would shoot half the customers if I worked a fast food counter much less the drive through.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoMy first job was at Burger King. Working the drive thru was seen by most as a punishment. During the day it wasn't that bad but at night people were absolutely ridiculous in their behavior and expectations. It didn't help that many were drunk or under the influence of other intoxicants. Not sure how well automated systems would be able to deal with such situations. Maybe the customers simply couldn't order food unless they conformed to the system. Or maybe they'd just drive off, with the business losing a sale. With the near ubiquity of internet connected phones and tablets, making a greater push for people parking outside the restaurant, ordering on their phone and having it delivered to their car curbside seems like the better medium to long term play. Get rid of the drive thru altogether. Likely would make the entire place safer for pedestrians too.
- loceng 7y agoSounds like a design funnel using AI system that doesn't respond to the shenanigans would take the reward away from them, and they'd just "behave" and order.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
- claar 7y agoMuch better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acquistion-of-Apprente-a-voice-based-tech-start-up/ https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu... @dang can we get the URL changed?
- donmcronald 7y agoYeah. That's a much better article. They're buying a company to work on it. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example. I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxes of words around to fix mistakes / assign unknown variables. The coolest part was where they showed how they could teach the computer that "my crib" was slang for my home location. It's one of those things where I figured it would be big deal and then I never heard about it again. I can't even remember what it was called. In this case, I imagine they could do something similar. As long as the computer can do good enough speech to text, there can be a human in there somewhere fixing up the tough stuff. I imagine it's a prelude to ordering directly from your phone as you're driving to pick up the food.
- hsod 7y agoSeems like they have access to a goldmine of labeled training data
- devoply 7y agoArticle you posted is mostly P/R fluff. I would prefer a human taking my order. Automating this stuff has 2 benefits, reduced costs while still selling over-priced sub-par food. Second, being able to upsell using video and voice technology. Are either of these good for consumers, not particularly. Nor are they good for employees. They are potentially good for management and ownership. That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight. Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's.
- tracker1 7y ago"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice." Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
- p1necone 7y agoI don't think I could get that right, what does "only cheese" mean exactly?
- patrickthebold 7y agoNo ketchup, pickles, onions or mustard.
- adventured 7y agoAs someone who only orders cheese on burgers (although with the buns), it means they only want the sandwich to consist of the meat and cheese (hold all other toppings; so if it would normally come with pickles, hold those). If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all the other toppings (or plausibly all the toppings), the with cheese part confirms that you actually do want a cheeseburger and that you only want the cheese. I've found that specific order instruction to be the closest to universally working across all chains, while generating the fewest errors, after ~25 years of testing combinations.
- King-Aaron 7y agoOh that won't be infuriating at all
- hirundo 7y agoNext they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones. Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck. Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
- Spooky23 7y agoNext they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.
- cbdumas 7y agoReally? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?
- bluedino 7y agoWe have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.
- randomdata 7y agoThe ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.
- jumelles 7y ago"What drinks do you have?" "Can I get combo without the drink?" "How much cheaper is it with a water?" "My kid wants the rainbow Happy Meal toy, can we have that one please?" "What time did you stop serving breakfast?" "Do you still have McFlurries? What flavors are there?" This won't go well.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoWill is stop people from using drive thru? If not, then it'll be annoyingly tolerated.
- burgerboy 7y agoI see no reason why a computer couldn't answer those questions
- CamperBob2 7y agoYeah, because the same machines that wiped the floor with a 9-dan Go champion a couple of years ago will be completely flummoxed by people placing orders at McDonald's.
- mattkrause 7y agoThey’re totally different domains. McDonald’s orders don’t have the crazy branching structure of Go, but they also aren’t nearly so self-contained.
- CamperBob2 7y agoHow is this not a perfect example of a self-contained problem? There are only so many items on the manu. Each can only be prepared in so many different ways, with so many different ingredients. Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News," IMO. Frankly this entire subthread is surreal, as if the site had seen a lot of recent signups from people who've never used a smart speaker before.
- esotericn 7y agoWhy not just stick a kiosk there? In Europe most McDs have kiosks inside them... make it weatherproof / stick a roof over it, done.
- vnchr 7y agoVoice ordering would have a lower installation cost since it can rely on the existing outdoor ordering interface, and it’s more familiar to their customers. There are 14,000 McDonalds in the US alone, so the switching costs and risks add up.
- jedieaston 7y agoMoes, a texmex chain in the United States, already does this. This firm provides the systems: https://www.nextepsystems.com/products/touchscreen-drive-through https://www.nextepsystems.com/products/touchscreen-drive-thr...
- macintux 7y agoEverything outdoors needs to be fairly robust, and the kiosks would be hard to reach and painfully slow compared to any voice system. I use them most times I go to McDonalds, but they’re always slower than it would be to just order if there’s no line, and worse, they feel much slower than they probably are.
- vallismortis 7y agoWelcome Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- fouc 7y agoIn some ways, the notion of humans as instruction-following-meat-robots actually just feels like an extension of a todo list or a check list, but with AI. So basically I could give the computer my task list, my goals, or whatever, along with data about my energy levels, mood, etc. Then it could return an optimized & personalized set of "Do X for the next 5 minutes, do Y for the next 15 minutes" instructions. That could result in significantly more productivity. I'm quite the fan of the exocortex notion - the computer as an external brain that extends my intelligence, productivity, etc.
- SECProto 7y agoWas there some other short story about a similar concept (AI managed fast food workers)? Something by Stallman or Doctorow maybe? I have vague deja-vu at that story, but from much longer ago than 2017, when Manna was published.
- chillacy 7y agoA lot going on there, my main observations: 1. the Australia Project resembles the society in Ian Banks' series The Culture 2. Curious that a post-capitalist society uses credits to ensure allocation, sort of a UBI, but it seems to gloss over a couple details: 2a. Do credits accrue or is it use-it-or-lose-it? 2b. It sounds like credits can be transferred between people (the space elevator story), what stops credit accrual from skewing via the Pareto Law into the same 1% having 99% of credits?
- mc32 7y agoWhimsically, I’d like to see this system only take orders in Japanese. Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is). Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations. But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian. M:いらっしゃいませ C:ハンバーガーを1つくださ M:はい
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wnmurphy 7y agoI cannot wait. Finally, going to McDonald's will lose all semblance of visiting a restaurant, and be fully realized as the experience of receiving various permutations of bleached flour, HFCS, and sad meat from a giant red and yellow robotic playdoh factory that it was always meant to be. One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added.
- blisterpeanuts 7y agoAs long as the AI can reliably and accurately serve me a decaf coffee, I'll be satisfied.
- ineedasername 7y agoLots of people here are saying they should just use a phone app. I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily. There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high. Maybe a kiosk would work though.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. Depends. Sometimes traffic laws only apply on roadways/highways, and not on private property.
- 51Cards 7y agoThey already have a phone app though. You order on your phone then pull into one of the pickup slots, note in the app which slot you're in and your food is brought out to you. Has been here in Canada for awhile now.
- cwkoss 7y agoI wouldn't want to touch an outdoor drive thru kiosk, I'd imagine it'd get gross very fast.
- zaroth 7y agoChick-Fil-A handles the queuing order problem by asking you just to confirm who you are at the drive through order station. They don’t start preparing your order until you check in. > “Mobile order for zaroth!” > “Thank you!” Most people order the same thing every time. Open app, click Favorite Reorder button. It can be exactly one tap. Or a Hey Siri if you like. This is how everyone orders their Starbucks coffee for years now. There’s no liability issue with providing an app to order ahead.
- jmkni 7y ago
- randomerr 7y agoThe local economist has been ascribing this move to the $15 minimum wage. His take is that the only way fast food can stay profitable, with the higher minimum wages, is automation. Computers cost less than people.
- chillacy 7y agoEveryone in the latest YC class working on an automation-like product can now bump up their "cost savings" numbers in their pitch decks. Minimum wage increases work only if companies have to hire people.
- kylec 7y agoWhy not just use a call center for this? Someone pulls up to the speaker, and someone in another part of the world takes their order and puts it into the restaurant’s system. Surely that would be easier and have a greater chance of success than voice gen?
- bestnameever 7y agoThey've been doing that since 2006. I guess this is next step. source: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistance-journey-of-a-fastfood-order.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
- heavymark 7y agoPresumably because the idea is to save money, and a call center forever would be more expensive but the far more realistic issue, if unlike an AI that could provide a consistent on brand experience, with a call center your experience would be hit or miss every time and drive thoughts are already not usually a great experience so a low wage call center would probably be even worse. Taking away jobs is certainly an issue in itself but I imagine overall this will mean a more consistent experience that they can improve over time.
- cavisne 7y agoI wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered). Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- judge2020 7y agoI imagine some old systems from before the dawn of big data don't.
- triggercut 7y agoUnless the technology has improved I would say that most systems are not much better than a CB radio. The external microphones can be subject to a lot of wear and tear, external noise. I haven't any knowledge of a system as sophisticated as recording voice and storing, let alone pairing an audio segment to data on the pos. But rightly identified as a perfect opportunity to label training data, and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to deploy, at least in a limited capacity for the initial training and validation on this project.
- williesleg 7y agoIt's about time. I love getting H1B programmers writing shit code for cheap so I can scam them for fake food. Hopefully this'll shut that crap down for good.
- echang426 7y agoGreat another move to remove the human touch of service from the food industry. If anything I feel like we're still a few years away from being able to have AI sophisticated enough to mimic conversion for people to comfortable enough to use daily for even simple tasks such as taking orders.
- owenmarshall 7y agoI am fairly violently opposed to automation eliminating human jobs without some type of compensating control, which gets into a political place I don’t want to go right now. But having said that... The human touch of fast food ordering? What human touch? There isn’t much conversation that happens with the human that’s there today.
- chillacy 7y agoThere are the beginnings of political attention right now. Andrew Yang is of course the biggest champion in this cycle. But it's also started to catch the attention of Biden and DeBlasio (robot tax). Then on there are still some candidates who are in the "it's not happening" camp.
- zaroth 7y agoWhy would I order with my voice by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that? Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine. Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds, but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched. I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric. Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment!
- ilaksh 7y agoMcDonald's app is really convenient for ordering and paying. And they have coupons. I am a fan.
- dole 7y agoUsed to be a fan until they started having shittier coupons.
- buzzerbetrayed 7y agoTheir coupons used to be insane. I went all the time and they have to have lost money on me. I couldn't believe the amount of food I would get for almost nothing. It's no wonder that they couldn't sustain that.
- packetpirate 7y agoThis is a good point. Given the unreliability of voice recognition, an app would be preferable. But also, even a touchscreen where you can select your order would be a better idea.
- fma 7y agoI've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering.
- mattferderer 7y agoI believe they experimented with this in the late 90's early 00's. I recall seeing job ads for rural remote workers doing exactly this kind of work. You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.
- ALittleLight 7y agoPlus, you can probably get better utilization from people in a call center. If the typical drive through worker is taking calls only 50% of the time, you can have one call center worker handle the work of two drive through people. You could also emphasize the "drive through" aspect for some customers if you could convince them to call while they were en route, or use the app to order, you could have their food waiting for them in a place where they could drive up, tap their phone, automatically get their food, etc.
- delfinom 7y ago>You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages. Hah. Low wages yes, but not Indian low wages. Profit trumps all.
- masonic 7y agoThose of you who are touting use of the McDonald's app: have you bothered to look at the permissions you are granting to the contents and usage of your phone in order to use the app?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DeafWiz 7y agoI think it's bad idea since there are a few lawsuits against restaurants that are not serving deaf customers. I'd say quite a lot complicated than you think. I understand the concept of automation but there are between cons and pros. For example, a car automation may develop the brain cancer by the radiation through the high-energy reception or whatever the factor may be but that's the point...it's going to be a long shot for sure.
- chillacy 7y agoHow do you order at a drive through if you're deaf today?
- habosa 7y agoAt many fast food restaurants, especially the less busy one, the person taking drive through orders is multitasking. I've seen people run the front register and the drive through ordering at the same time. It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoUp to 2 years ago our local McDonalds drive-in used to have a separate booth where you interacted with a person when you placed an order. Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI'm about 99.99964% positive that a key point behind voice (and touchscreen) sales interfaces will be to integrate upsell and/or advertising into the transaction consistently. Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
- nestorherre 7y agoTBH I wondered why they took so long.
- lupanar 7y agoLogical turn of events though, everything goes to human replacement by robots and/or AIs in many kind of manufactures. Total human replacement by robots is a matter of time I believe.
- la_barba 7y agoIronically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte.