In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order. 

Lmao didn’t even know you could add butter to something at McDonald’s. If you can’t then it’s even funnier it decided that’s a thing.

Understanding the variety of speech over a drive-thru speaker can be difficult for a human with experience in the job. I can't see the current level of voice recognition matching it, especially if it's using LLMs for processing of what it managed to detect. If I'm placing a food order I don't need a LLM hallucination to try and fill in blanks of what it didn't convert correctly to tokens or wasn't trained on.

Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian

Wasn’t this just voice recognition for orders? We’ve been doing this for years without it being called AI, but I guess now the marketing people are in charge

You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.

An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn't the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven't been for decades at this point.

Ah yes, give me more companies using AI, trying to replace their employees and then realizing it doesn't work

Give me 5000 nuggets and bacon on muh ice cream.

drives away

1: Does IBM even have an LLM that would be considered "good" these days? Maybe they do, but I haven't heard about it.

2: If this was in 2019, no wonder it flopped. Only very recently have we gotten to a point where this should've even been considered (and then, in my opinion given the current state of LLMs, dismissed).

3: More than 100 stores were testing this?? Did they not think to start with like, one store and see if that worked at all?

4: While a short-lived victory, this is still a win for people that rely on these jobs. Good for them.

AI is going the same way as self-driving cars...

It has the power to bring such amazing change, but greed is poisoning the technology, and it's being weaponized against the lower and middle class in disguising ways.

Shoutout to Elon for fucking up self driving cars by releasing cheap, imitation technology after his competitors spent literal decades carefully testing and perfecting genuine solutions.

Greed is why we can't have nice things... Everyone should be angrier about this stuff.

These large companies really need to learn that AI isn't a good tool for black and white decisions.

Right now I'm working on a system with drones and image recognition for farmers to prioritise where to use pesticides, in order to decrease the use of pesticides in the EU. For these things AI systems work really well, since it's just prioritising regions.

It's a bad idea to use it to make discrete decisions.

Hey, McDonalds, I got a general AI that can understand human speech.

It's located between my neck and the top of my head, and it costs $25/hr for fuel consumption.

Turns out customers weren't ordering the McDeadly neurotoxin

I use the app to order then they bring it out to my car. No need to deal with people, fake or not.

Voice recognition vs. Download an app where you can't make mistakes (and a giant corporation can harvest your data). Hmm, I wonder which mcway mcdonalds will go?

"Will you be using our app today?"

Isn't this just voice recognition software?

Would this even be necessary for automated ordering anyway? Given that every company under the sun wants you to use some app of theirs these days, including fast food companies, Im kinda surprised they dont just get rid of the speaker/microphone system, and just put a sign with a qr code in front of the drive through telling you to download and use their app to put in a drive through order

Wouldn't it make more sense to just drop the speakers and make them use mobile apps only?

It's like those self service kiosks they have. The first version was broken most of the time, but they got the bugs worked out and after that those kiosks were everywhere.

Are they also going to remove the human order takers due to number of errors or…. Because they never get shit right, then I correct them, then the kitchen kids get it wrong, occasionally i go back around to ask for it as I ordered, and sometimes the second time around it’s correct

Who needs Ronald McDonald when you have managers like them?