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Comment by funkymike | Hacker News Reader

I have an example that illustrates this.

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.

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English is not my primary language and I live in a country where I don't speak the local language which is not English, I have consistent issues with miscommunication.

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.

I know! Reading your food order verbally from a paper-printed menu to a human who needs to memorize or write it down and walk back to deliver it to the food prep area, seems to be such an error-prone and ambiguous way to order a product. Doubly silly that often the waiter will simply take the order and enter it right into some kind of computer or kiosk. Just give me the damn computer! It's shocking that the vast majority or restaurants still do it this way.

Red Robin lets order (and pay) from a kiosk at the table. The only problem with it is you're eating at Red Robin.

I guess it depends on what type of restaurant you're going to. If you're going to a cheap, fast service restaurant then sure, I'd like to have a tablet I could use to order from.

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.

> They can give you recommendations on dishes, and wine matches, and help you get exactly what service you want.

That just sounds like a very poor database.

It's actually a very rich 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.

Discovery can be bad too. If you don't eat meat or pork or whatever, you often have to go through the menu in O(n) and look for your options. And then maybe it's a dish they've stopped making months ago, but printing new menus would have been to expensive. (OK, that won't happen at McDonald's.)

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.

They're tied to propriatary tech glasses to boots. The ability to hire a tech person is so far outside restaurant spend that they outsource to a single company, which handles all their software, their registers, and provides support. Your best bet is to sell it as a code module to the PoS integrator.

Wow I'm really shocked by all the responses. I think the majority of the world - ie outside of our tech bubble - would much rather deal with a human than enter their order in on a computer. Particularly in a restaurant. In fact I'd go further and say that a good proportion of non-technical people would not only prefer to deal with humans, but would trust another human more than themselves with a computer interface.

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.

I'm a native English speaker and once received a Big Mac with no meat from a McDonalds in America.

Be careful what you wish for. The Burger King at the NYS Thruway rest stop just north of NYC has one. Think McDonalds has them on Long Island, but I haven’t used one.

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.

I remember when Google rolled out a hands free payment system at McDonalds and the identity verification step involved speaking your initials to the McDonalds employee. Despite so much automation (not even needing to pull out your phone) the system totally failed on the verbal interpretation of the initials: "Did you say "J" or "G"??" and gesturing the shape of the letter with fingers.

Relatedly, I've found it a little unfortunate that, whenever I'm asked to spell out something to a human, chances are the receiver has either never heard of the NATO Phoenetic Alphabet or doesn't understand it.

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