"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice."
Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
[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.
"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...
"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.
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.