McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc
There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.
Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.
Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
[EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.
This last week I noticed the UI had some major improvements and was ultra snappy.
I expect they took user feedback and are slow rolling a version 2.0.
Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.
It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc.
Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.
Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...
https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/28/poo-found-on-every-mcdonalds-...
Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.
Senior lecturer in microbiology at London Metropolitan University Dr Paul Matewele said: ‘We were all surprised how much gut and faecal bacteria there was on the touchscreen machines. These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals.
Did they swab the food bags and food that came out as well? Poo particles are probably everywhere.
Either it's simply not true, or it is true and it doesn't matter.
I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever.
I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.
It also helps that the devices are pretty responsive, and allow you to order everything.
The downside is that I often see older people struggle with it, I guess for them it would be easier to talk to a human.
I suppose I am the opposite. I enjoy attempting to order food in a tongue I am learning. But going through the process with a native English speaker, I'd rather just push a button on the kiosk.
I suppose all this was extensively play-tested, but I have no idea what sort of person play tested it given the result.
Brick & mortar kiosks are the DVD Netflix of fast food.
It's so much nicer to be able to take your time, actually view the menu and costs of items, and choose what you want to eat without a line of hungry people waiting behind you.
> Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The robot janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Anything that complex would probably go through a chemical wash rather than having a robot get into every corner. Some medical equipment like endoscopes are cleaned this way.
I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.
In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.
And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.
this won't happen automatically. it will have to be a conscious decision. how do you propose to get there instead of the dystopian future where things are infinitely more scarce for some and not for others which seems to be our default trajectory
Automation has overall improved quality of life significantly. We can now grow so much food that we can easily feed the world many times over. Clothing has become so cheap that many items are practically free. And trips around the world are no longer accessible to only that top 0.1-1%. It's not all gloom and doom.
But we might just not want it _yet_. There’s a lot of work to be done first to prepare people for being layed off, reskilled, or retired en masse.
Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.
This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker.
I am not hopeful about the future.
If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation.
As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows?
If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!
like this? https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...
This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.
A few thoughts, having worked in "Quick Service Restaurants" a long long time ago.
Ignoring cost of human labor and a move to equipment maintenance for a moment, one of the key metrics tracked is waste/loss, i.e. from the bins in the kitchen. Amounts of discarded buns, lettuce, tomatoes, burnt or spoiled, past due-date, serve-time etc. it all gets tallied and recorded.
If you get sent one box of frozen fries weighing a known amount, that should translate into (x) number of servings +- a fairly narrow distribution curve. If you go through 10 boxes but only sold 9(x) servings then maybe your staff are overfilling, dropping, burning or eating the fries. Either way, they are losing you cash. The cash at the tail end of your otherwise carefully controlled supply chain.
Anything that cost effectively eliminates waste will be next.
I did however use the same model in Palo Alto recently. Turns out they’re not bad if they’re well maintained and charge a small fee (50¢) to use.
at this rate they will soon need robo customers.
I mean, what is the real MVP for McD? It's sourcing, uni-forming, storing and then cooking food. Assembly doesn't really need to be part of it.
Sadly, they got rid of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mj7_a1Egew
The next step will be loading the products into the grill and unloading them automatically...and that's already in the works.
But robot assembly of sandwiches is a long way off. Humans are way more flexible and efficient here. The key is removing the repetitive tasks from their workload.
Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine.
Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds, but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched.
I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric.
Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment!
One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added.
@dang can we get the URL changed?
It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example.
I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxes of words around to fix mistakes / assign unknown variables. The coolest part was where they showed how they could teach the computer that "my crib" was slang for my home location.
It's one of those things where I figured it would be big deal and then I never heard about it again. I can't even remember what it was called.
In this case, I imagine they could do something similar. As long as the computer can do good enough speech to text, there can be a human in there somewhere fixing up the tough stuff.
I imagine it's a prelude to ordering directly from your phone as you're driving to pick up the food.
That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight.
Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's.
I assume such a tax would replace the local state based sales taxes?
Having said that when I was in the US, it was very frustrating to never know how much something would cost me based on the advertised price.
Probably not. Government's aren't keen on reducing tax.
Your initial point's thinking isn't evolved enough: in Europe the # I have heard, however I haven't confirm - it does however align with my own understanding, is that 55% of the VAT tax is paid for by a company's profits; companies have to maintain being competitive by not transferring 100% of the tax to consumers, e.g. companies will compete based on how much profit margin they're giving themselves.
I'm not sure how Andrew Yang at least will implement the VAT - it will be 10% VAT vs. Europe's 20% - which will maintain competitiveness with Europe. Likewise, Yang doesn't think income tax is a good idea because he believes you should incentivize and not penalize people who are actually working; tax people who are consuming.
And agreed, there is indeed a planned confusion - psychological trick - that occurs, manipulates people - when something is priced at say $9.97 - where people tend towards not calculating the final price that includes tax, and it otherwise requires people to unnecessarily use mental energy to do calculations if the person wants to stay very price conscious.
This article is the source of the HN-linked BBC article.
I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc.
What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order.
I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans.
With the near ubiquity of internet connected phones and tablets, making a greater push for people parking outside the restaurant, ordering on their phone and having it delivered to their car curbside seems like the better medium to long term play. Get rid of the drive thru altogether. Likely would make the entire place safer for pedestrians too.
Although I think drone delivery could be more efficient. Even though you are flying, you are moving maybe 50 or 100 pounds instead of 2000 or 3000.
Drive-thrus aren't the only things people use while they're drunk
There are probably people using your website or app while drunk. How does your user experience handle this?
You make it sound like google could just flip a switch and the assistant would magically work better. If it were that simple, why would they intentionally limit the platform?
Restaurant servers will still exist at the higher-end, much like chauffeurs do today. But most people won't be driving their cars and a human won't be taking burger orders or grilling the patty.
I think we are going to have another “AI” winter.
Are we so sure it's that different this time around? Sure, current AI are better, but are they better enough?
Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all the other toppings (or plausibly all the toppings), the with cheese part confirms that you actually do want a cheeseburger and that you only want the cheese. I've found that specific order instruction to be the closest to universally working across all chains, while generating the fewest errors, after ~25 years of testing combinations.
The dipping cup ranch, for those curious is because the ranch dressing has a lot of added sugar/carbs and the dipping cups are like 1.5g each. Severely diabetic and nearly 0 carb has been the only effective way to manage it well.
Of course, it’s always possible some new employee would mess it up, or anything on your order actually. With turn over so high, there was no shortage of such errors.
"Hello this is Lakshmi, how may I help you?"
I think they found that orders were a couple seconds faster. Dunno why they didn't go forward with it: the outsourcing advantages are obvious.
Found the article: 2006 NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
[0] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/double-quarter-po...
Again, you'd be surprised how well orders can come out wrong and the way I do order it reduces that chance as much as possible. It's also less expensive to order as a meal with the side salad as a sub for fries, but that means more risk of the order being wrong in the end.
If I could order "Two quarter patties with cheese, ..." then I would do just that.
"Can I get a burger with two patties?"
Personally I usually just order what's on the menu but there must be lots of people asking for substitutions or modifications. That's the general public for you. I wonder how this "AI" is going to handle it.
Probably it will just pass the order to a human if it totally doesn't get it, rather than risk screwing it up too badly. Or maybe McDonald's has already figured out how much it will cost to re-do someone's meal versus having another human on the payroll.
The hard part is:
"Can you put [specific toy] in the kids meal?"
"Wait, no, I want ketchup on that. I mean, mustard."
"Can you bring it out to me when its ready?"
"Your ice machine is broken?"
"My debit card doesn't have much money on it, so just ring up my order until it hits $20."
Taking an order is totally doable. Answering questions that require stateful knowledge is hard.
"Just wait a second while I look that up"
"Ok, your debit balance is zero."
"I see you haven't ordered a drink, would you like to add one?"
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.”
:)
It's not like being pissed off because something isn't in the color I want. Product colors and manufacturing are hard problems... getting a fast food order right isn't.
The problem is the younger generations don't give a damn about their quality of work.
I wouldn't expect anyone to figure this out. Every fragment is a contradiction! Without a bun is it a sandwich? Only cheese already means no bun?
(Cheese/bun part addressed in other comments.)
Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year.
Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin.
I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!".
When I was at the pay window paying, two or three different people stopped to ask the cashier if it was true that I had really changed my order.
When I got to the other window to pick up my order, there were still people coming up to the person manning the window to ask if it was really true that my order had changed. I could also hear people in the background talking about it.
In short, apparently everyone working there was talking about my change of order as if it was the most astounding thing they had ever witnessed.
They handed me the bag, and I checked it--and they had gotten it wrong! The sausage McMuffin was missing, another Egg McMuffin in its place.
This over 20 years ago.
Some things stick in the memory, on both sides.
WOULD YOU LIKE THE REGULAR, MR TRACKER1? DIET DR. PEPPER IS ON SALE THIS WEEK.
I'm also assuming that if the AI is having trouble, they just shoot the tasty food ordering mic over to a call center in the Philippines.
Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.
The external microphones can be subject to a lot of wear and tear, external noise. I haven't any knowledge of a system as sophisticated as recording voice and storing, let alone pairing an audio segment to data on the pos. But rightly identified as a perfect opportunity to label training data, and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to deploy, at least in a limited capacity for the initial training and validation on this project.
I'm quite the fan of the exocortex notion - the computer as an external brain that extends my intelligence, productivity, etc.
1. the Australia Project resembles the society in Ian Banks' series The Culture
2. Curious that a post-capitalist society uses credits to ensure allocation, sort of a UBI, but it seems to gloss over a couple details:
2a. Do credits accrue or is it use-it-or-lose-it?
2b. It sounds like credits can be transferred between people (the space elevator story), what stops credit accrual from skewing via the Pareto Law into the same 1% having 99% of credits?
Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is).
Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations.
But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian.
M:いらっしゃいませ
C:ハンバーガーを1つくださ
M:はい
It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could.
You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.
You could also emphasize the "drive through" aspect for some customers if you could convince them to call while they were en route, or use the app to order, you could have their food waiting for them in a place where they could drive up, tap their phone, automatically get their food, etc.
Hah. Low wages yes, but not Indian low wages. Profit trumps all.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily.
There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high.
Maybe a kiosk would work though.
Depends. Sometimes traffic laws only apply on roadways/highways, and not on private property.
> “Mobile order for zaroth!”
> “Thank you!”
Most people order the same thing every time. Open app, click Favorite Reorder button. It can be exactly one tap. Or a Hey Siri if you like.
This is how everyone orders their Starbucks coffee for years now. There’s no liability issue with providing an app to order ahead.
This is already a thing. The only thing it's missing is number plate recognition, so I don't need to talk to anybody.
In Europe most McDs have kiosks inside them... make it weatherproof / stick a roof over it, done.
I use them most times I go to McDonalds, but they’re always slower than it would be to just order if there’s no line, and worse, they feel much slower than they probably are.
Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells
Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
This won't go well.
Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News," IMO.
Frankly this entire subthread is surreal, as if the site had seen a lot of recent signups from people who've never used a smart speaker before.
On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.”
It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.
Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure.
But having said that...
The human touch of fast food ordering? What human touch? There isn’t much conversation that happens with the human that’s there today.
Andrew Yang is of course the biggest champion in this cycle. But it's also started to catch the attention of Biden and DeBlasio (robot tax).
Then on there are still some candidates who are in the "it's not happening" camp.
So that's a lie.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli...
Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out?
Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out?
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when.
This article contributes nothing.
All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet.
Ugh. No wonder why the project failed. It treated people as tools instead of people.
There should be a custom board of keys. The more common the order item, the bigger the button to press.