[HN Gopher] Wendy's debuts an A.I. chatbot for drive-thru orders
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       Wendy's debuts an A.I. chatbot for drive-thru orders
        
       Author : DocFeind
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2023-05-10 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fortune.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
        
       | petee wrote:
       | Dunkin Donuts is trying this too; It was a very awkward
       | conversation. They still don't have the tone, cadence, or
       | response time of a human.l
       | 
       | At the window they confirmed most people were complaining about
       | it
        
         | DANmode wrote:
         | Which regions are these things cropping up in?
        
       | 666satanhimself wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | danjoredd wrote:
       | "hello, can I get some cheesy bacon fries"
       | 
       | >baconator added
       | 
       | "no, remove that"
       | 
       | >baconator removed
       | 
       | "Add cheesy bacon fries"
       | 
       | >frosty added
        
       | lockhouse wrote:
       | I'm just sad that these pushes for over the top minimum wage for
       | low skill jobs has really limited the options of my children for
       | summer jobs. Growing up it was practically a right of passage to
       | get a "McJob" for the summer to pay for movie tickets, keeping
       | gas in your car, and just having fun with your friends in general
       | without having to ask your parents for cash. That little bit of
       | independence and learning the value of working hard for the
       | things you want was so important as teenager, and now I fear it
       | will be gone soon. It was also such a humbling experience that
       | has shaped how I interact with the people I encounter that work
       | customer facing jobs.
        
         | angmarsbane wrote:
         | Lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons still make for a good
         | teenage job, anything that requires physical presence.
        
           | lockhouse wrote:
           | Yes, but there's not nearly as many of those jobs and they
           | require advanced training. The beauty of the classic fast
           | food "McJob" was that you could learn it in a couple days
           | with no prior experience and make just enough money to be
           | worthwhile as a teenager's summer job.
        
       | fatnoah wrote:
       | Having been in a position to take fast food orders from people,
       | there are a whole lot of interactions beyond just ordering food.
       | People ask a surprising number of questions about the menu, food
       | content, and other things.
        
         | NumberWangMan wrote:
         | That's all stuff that LLMs are really, really good at handling
         | though. All you need is prompts that explain what's on the
         | menu, all the ingredients, allergy info, calorie counts, etc.
         | and it will be able to handle it. And I'm sure they'll be
         | recording questions for which the LLM has no good answer, to
         | improve it.
         | 
         | Note that people adjust their behavior as well. As people
         | interact with these more, they'll sometimes be frustrated but
         | they'll adjust.
         | 
         | Now, after all that, please don't paint me as a techno-
         | optimist. I think that it's very likely that we're about to
         | cause some massive social problems by making it so that the
         | average human doesn't have many options where they can provide
         | more economic value than a machine, and meanwhile, are there
         | really that many problems today that tech can solve, as opposed
         | to problems of simply coordinating people?
         | 
         | And that's not getting into the whole "are AGIs going to make
         | humanity extinct" question, which, after getting into it, I
         | think is pretty darned likely at the rate we're going.
        
           | sieabahlpark wrote:
           | [dead]
        
       | LeroyRaz wrote:
       | I'd worry about customers asking allergy questions, and getting
       | incorrect answers
        
         | nicenewtemp84 wrote:
         | Do you really think you'll get accurate allergy info from the
         | current crop of Wendys employees?
         | 
         | Even IF they knew what to recite from the handbook, the odds of
         | surfaces being kept clean enough or incorrect items not making
         | it into a meal are low.
        
       | joezydeco wrote:
       | McDonald's has been testing this one for a while, I encountered a
       | siri-like voice at the drive-thru a year or two ago. Long before
       | that they tried outsourcing the order taking to a central
       | facility somewhere in Minnesota. That was a fun experience.
       | 
       | In both cases it looks like they went back to human order takers.
        
       | nullc wrote:
       | So its a standard voice recognizing IVR but on a sign instead of
       | on a phone?
        
         | brian_herman wrote:
         | I think it is through the app. Google IO had a picture of it.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-10 23:03 UTC)