The same thing happens for McDonald's and other places replacing cashiers with touch-screen terminals, not only I am sure of how the system understood me, I can easily navigate the several options without annoying an employee with dozens of questions, going from that to conversational UI is a step back in the wrong direction.
Just this morning I stopped at McDonald's for breakfast. I gave my order, they entered it, and it showed up correctly on the screen at the drive through. However, the order taker read back something completely different (than what they just entered). Since I saw that the order in the system was correct I ignored that and simply said "sure that's right."
This is why I prefer an interface that bypasses the human order taker. They may say one thing and do another. Even in my case, they may have then thought "well he confirmed what I just said back, and that doesn't match what the screen shows, so I'll fix it to match what the customer agreed to." Then I would have the wrong order. That can't happen if I interact directly with the order system.
Once I went to a McDonald's and ordered some double cheeseburger with no onions, when the order came it was just the buns with no meat.
Especially in a place like McDonald's where they serve several people familiar with the menu, the staff seems annoyed if you don't know what the ingredients of one of their menu items are and often don't handle specific requests well.
It's not just language issues, my ex-girlfriend always asked a lot of questions when ordering at restaurants, sometimes checking with me, you can visibly see the waiter getting tired or annoyed because of this, not coincidentally, there is always some minor screw up with the order because they forgot to write something down. The same happens if you go to a restaurant with 20+ people and the waiter comes in to take everyone's order, the chances of making a mistake goes up.
Personally I'm techy and I still prefer the human aspect. In fact part of the appeal of going to a restaurant is to be waited upon - otherwise I might as well just order a takeaway online. Sure they might occasionally screw up your order but this doesn't happen nearly as often as this thread would suggest. I do eat out a lot and I honestly don't think I've had my order messed up in the last 2 years. I wouldn't say I eat at particularly posh places either though I do actively avoid most fast food establishments (not a snobby thing, I just don't like the taste of McDonalds et al) so maybe the issue of reliability is more subject to the lowest paid positions in the food service?
In any case, even if you did have your way and entered your orders directly into a computer, you'd still have to deal with the fallibility of humans with the chef cooking your food, waiter / delivery driver distributing your food, and anyone else who exists along the chain. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the mishaps described in this thread were actually failings of those individuals rather than the order takers whom you assumed had messed the order up.
But if I'm at a good restaurant, a server is actually part of the service. They can give you recommendations on dishes, and wine matches, and help you get exactly what service you want. Also the human experience is just part of the fine dining experience.
It would be really strange if I want to Eleven Madison Park or Bouchon and they just handed me an iPad to order my food from.
That just sounds like a very poor database.
It's not just simple pairings, but includes nuances that would take many different fields to capture: Dish X can be made vegan, but tastes better if you then order with extra seasoning.
With a tablet, you could filter the list with a single tap. I've thought about building such an app a few years ago because I'd love to use it, but I have no idea how you could sell it to restaurants. It seems most places are too conservative and cash-strapped to tie themselves to proprietary tech.
It’s awful — probably an order of magnitude more awful than dealing with a non-English speaking cashier. As with anything digital, it’s a sales funnel designed to trick you into ordering whatever their profit driver is. Have fun not buying a value meal.
But what if you don't know what your options are and how much they cost? You have to ask the person to list off the possible pizza styles, sizes, toppings, and the prices for each one. Then they have to tell you about all the available side dishes and desserts (with prices, again) and how there's a half-off deal if you get THIS side with THAT pizza on a Tuesday, and on and on and on. It'd probably take a good 20 minutes to convey all that over the phone (I hope you have a good memory or are taking notes), and by the time they're done, the poor employee is probably so frustrated that they're ready to strangle you.
Or, I can suck up all that information at a glance on dominos.com, and I won't have to repeat my credit card number over the phone 5 times before they get it right.
Restaurant websites always, without exception, suck. Dominos, while the pizza is garbage, has a wonderful ordering website. But even then the actual menu is awful.
They are always a sales funnel first, menu second. They cannot give accurate ETA, ever. It’s harder to display multiple choices well on a screen vs a sheet of paper.
Unless you are a place with 5 menu items, the paper menu is superior in almost every scenario.
Otherwise, they're just acting as a voice interface for a GUI that I'm perfectly able to navigate on my own, and I'm not a fan of voice interfaces when dealing with technical systems.
I think this is an assumption that might not hold true, outside of the tech sphere.
Us? Of course we want imperative interfaces! E.g. "Order me a pizza using JSON with my pizza_now script with options -g and -b and promo code CASEOFTHEMONDAYS"
People who are not technically inclined? End-state declarative. I see most as fine saying "Order me a pizza with pepperoni" and having it show up at their door.
Ordering a pizza as shown in the above example is very contrived, no one needs that, a GUI is much better to execute this use case. But the power of chatbots will light up if it can answer 'Would this pizza be too spicy?", "can you deliver this after 4pm?". What I mean is when the chatbots can take over more of customer queries which otherwise might be directed to the store via phone call. Or something which requires deep knowledge of the product and when not every corner case can be put on the GUI menu.
"Ok Google, get me 10 Margherita pizzas by this evening" is super convenient.
Wait...
A while back, one of the big features Google advertised was the ability to start a transaction by voice, and then continue it on a device with a screen.
I'll pay but I prefer when someone else orders a pizza.