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.