In South Korea, robots are on the job. How is the service?

I like the kiosk to order because I can browse all the options without a queue of hungry people behind me waiting to order.

Yes, but the flip side is that it's much more practical for a McDonald's to have 6 or 8 or 10 ordering kiosks than a bunch of employees taking orders.

Personally I prefer having the gaggle of kiosks because while it's slower, there's a few advantages:

* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above

* Can take my time looking through everything, even with a more complex order, without social pressure of knowing I'm hindering everyone behind me

* Foreign language options when traveling

Of course, it's probably a good idea to have at least one human employee who can at least optionally handle orders in cases where the kiosk doesn't work.

I honestly love the McDonalds touch screens because they allow more people to order at the same time (take less space than a register), while also allowing staff to focus on making the food instead of working the register. The biggest benefit to something like this is however that you can order in your native language basically wherever you are, even if the staff don't know English and they can't accidentally mess up your order.

I think it depends on where you are and even what the economy is like. I experienced bad service in countries that paid low wages and tipping wasn't normal. I experienced bad service when restaurants were shortening hours open because they couldn't find enough people to work and workers could be bad servers and still not get fired. I'd prefer a consistent experience with a robot over inconsistent experience with a human server not to mention not having to tip. And regarding use cases, if 1 out of 10 instances required a human it's still faster than 10 out of 10 instances and don't get me started on "I don't have to write it down I'll remember it all". The robot will remember.

> This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.

The same thing happens when a computer system which is being used by a human crashes. Or a human worker needs to diverge from the happy path in a slightly complicated way.

At this level, I feel like theres dozens of well-designed 2D web-based intake forms that have fixed this problem without needing a backup human.

This seems to be more of a bad/incomplete implementation than a structural problem with robots/kiosks.

When our robots [1] provide some sort of screen-based interaction, there's always an option to speak with a human via remote video chat.

There's this misconception that everything needs to be autonomous all the time. Not only does this not need to be the case... sometimes it's distinctly better to build a system that can accommodate some remote human assistance -- whether that's flexibility, customer service, cultural, or even as a technology assist (e.g. to overcome "last mile" issues until the autonomy catches up). By building 95%-99.9%+ autonomous systems, you learn how to achieve 100% service operations, bootstrap new capabilities, and improve autonomy based on real-world experience.

[1] https://www.cobaltrobotics.com/

These hangups seems to me like the kind of thing that is going to greatly improve over time. As was mentioned in another reply thread, the kiosks would benefit from being able to simply repeat your order. It's only a matter of time until this is a feature. Similarly, what falls under your definition of "normal use case" is going to slowly expand as the developers become more familiar with what implementations are important (and have better libraries to deal with the routine implementations).

> if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.

I’d argue that the majority of users can’t be bothered to RTFM (and the “M” here is usually one sentence above the call to action) and just want someone to do it for them / hold their hand. These customers are a big drain for customer support and ironically make automated support appealing. Meanwhile the legit edge case becomes a casualty of this automation.

It's worth noting this happens with humans too. How often have you called up tech support with a slightly complicated case and the person on the other end was just no help at all either because they lacked knowledge or weren't empowered to assist you with your edge case?

I get the human can probably handle this particular case, but it's not true for a lot of customer service problems.

>This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad.

On the article's anecdote, I'm pretty sure the robot didn't just literally "freeze" but show a message explaining that number is unknown and ask to retry with the right one. The customer couldn't understand the international prefix was missing, and kept reinputing the same thing again and again.

That kind of stuff will regularly happen with human being typing into the form for you, and telling you the system can't find your number. It's after the first or second try that they'll start debugging with you, checking if you changed you number or put your spouse's one, if it's foreign etc. That "traditional" flow doesn't seem too far from the experience the author had, except they perhaps tried 5 or 6 times instead of 2, because in their mind the robot must be dumb in that specific way and can totally react differently the 6th time.

I'd argue the robot setting is kind of the best of both worlds: customers in the happy path will fly through the system, and customers hitting the wall will have staff that are specially ready to work it out with the customer.

PS: even with a half-baked input system, customers who get used to it after the second or third time will still be faster than dealing with staff inputing their info for them. It's a clear advantage for repeaters.

Fast food restaurants employees are not faster at explaining the menu, or showing the payment options, scanning the membership card etc. IME you can't just dump a magic incantation at the cashier and have them remember it all while hitting the right buttons. Some might be capable of that, most are just part time students keeping their mental energy for the next day's lectures.

Henn na Hotel, literally "a strange hotel".

That's from 2019. I wonder if they're reactivated robots due to covid.

This is better example for Japan. Famous cheap restaurant franchise introducing robots. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Food-Beverage/Japan-s-Skyla...

That's a fair point. I'm sure more experimentation and optimization in form factor will happen, depending on use case and settings. There's no need to engineer unnecessary humanoid qualities beyond what is necessary due to cost.

Automation is really interesting, especially how sometimes some companies are so far ahead of others. Sometimes when I check out of a hotel I still gotta stand in line and talk to a clerk -- which is intensely frustrating, because there's this sense of, "all I need to do is hand in this damn keycard" -- other times I just drop the hotel key in a box. Hell, apparently some hotels you can just check in with an app and use the app to unlock the door.

Today I dropped off a rental car and the employee just scanned a barcode on the windshield and said, "okay just put the keys on the dash, you're good to go". Such a huge improvement over what it used to be, years ago.

I think that’s true and a more casual setting may prevail. Sometimes a part of the restaurant experience is being served and when done well can make for an exceptional experience. I can see myself consuming both depending on time, place and mood.

There was an outfit that was making these to deliver food to hospital patients a few years ago. Don't know if it ever became a thing in hospitals though.

How much did you tip them?

Care to share what kind of restaurants are using these? I’m guessing they’re more the cafeteria-style places. My family owns a few fine dining restaurants and are constantly getting sales people trying to sell them robot food runners. It’s always an amusing sales pitch.

There's a place in sunnyvale that brings your food out to you by robot.

No ordering though. don't know if refills could come out.

EDIT: pho #1 in sunnyvale ca

I have been to many restaurants in the US without wait service (order at counter and bus yourself) and self serve water dispensers.

There is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kv9eeKqmNk

https://foldimate.store/

I remember watching lost in space reruns years ago as a kid.

I re-watched an episode recently as an adult and it was hiliarious.

mrs robinson was doing laundry, and put all the clothes in a washing machine and closed the lid. Then she immediately opened the lid and pulled everything out, it was already neatly folded and in a bag.

(and curiously the machine was sitting outside the spaceship)

EDIT: "How to do laundry in space"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4bdaN6MRT8

lol

These look terrifying.