6 ms·

"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 tha

"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 ago
Will is stop people from using drive thru? If not, then it'll be annoyingly tolerated.
burgerboy 7y ago
I see no reason why a computer couldn't answer those questions
CamperBob2 7y ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  They’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 ago
    How 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.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      Menu ordering can be automated. Customers, however, can't be, and they'll ask for and do the wackiest shit: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromretail/top?t=month https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromretail/top?t=month
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate. On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.” It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

Will is stop people from using drive thru? If not, then it'll be annoyingly tolerated.

burgerboy 7y ago

I see no reason why a computer couldn't answer those questions

CamperBob2 7y ago

Yeah, 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 ago
They’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 ago
  How 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.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    Menu ordering can be automated. Customers, however, can't be, and they'll ask for and do the wackiest shit: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromretail/top?t=month https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromretail/top?t=month
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate. On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.” It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.