3 ms·
As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this. Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard. * Often lots of b
by SkyPuncher 1y ago
As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this.
Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard.
* Often lots of background noise
* Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic)
* People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out.
* People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu".
* The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me".
* It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food.
* Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.
- eigenspace 1y agoYes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.
- ElectronCharge 1y agoActually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...
- gspencley 1y agoThe thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated. Take automated phone menu systems, for example. "If you are calling about X, press 1 If you are calling about Y, press 2 If you are calling about Z, press 3" customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human "I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9." Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.