from Hacker News

McDonald's will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now

by palad1n on 6/17/24, 2:35 AM with 52 comments

• by rahimnathwani on 6/17/24, 4:30 AM

  PSA: Use the McDonald's mobile app, and always check the 'Deals' section before you order. On average you'll probably save 15%. Sometimes with a BOGOF, at other times with a discounted item.

  You can still use the drive through if you like. Just mention your order code instead of telling them your whole order.

• by dangus on 6/17/24, 3:23 AM

  I would think that this is one of those LLM use cases that will definitely happen once McDonald’s finds a technology partner they like.

  On the other hand, I also wonder if humans are too good at this task to make a big capital investment worth it. The employees who take your orders at McDonald’s aren’t standing around doing nothing, they’re wearing a headset and multitasking.

• by MBCook on 6/17/24, 3:19 AM

  Was that not nationwide? I guess I had just assumed it was as all my local McDs have it.

  Seems to work just fine the few times I’ve tried it, but as a native speaker of US English without much of regional accent I’m not exactly a tough test.

• by ivraatiems on 6/17/24, 5:48 AM

  Carl's Jr was also piloting a similar technology. An AI took my order a few weeks ago, and mostly got it right (but didn't understand that I wanted "no sauce" with a certain item and gave me a side of sauce instead).

  I asked the real human at the window whether they liked the AI system. They said no, it made far too many mistakes. In fact, the company was going to be uninstalling it soon because it was wasting too much time.

  I can think of about a million reasons that might be, but one which particularly came to mind is that I live in an area where around 40% of people are Spanish speakers as their first language, and many of them speak no or very little English. The drive-thru employees would be completely capable of switching to Spanish (or summoning a Spanish-speaking employee) as needed, but according to the woman at the window, the AI couldn't do that. It also had issues with accents.

  None of that is unsolvable, but it's disappointing that it apparently wasn't even thought of.

• by ilaksh on 6/17/24, 5:57 AM

  I was under the impression that the Checkers system was effective? https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/13ivx5s/a_robo...

• by add-sub-mul-div on 6/17/24, 3:32 AM

  Is their bottom tier food really worth the same kind of indignity you're made to go through when you have to call your credit card company?