When You Call a Restaurant, You Might Be Chatting with an AI Host | Hacker News Reader

When You Call a Restaurant, You Might Be Chatting with an AI Host

wired.com

14 pointsrntn23 comments

This could work great if the assistants actually had the full knowledge you'd expect from a human answering the phone. Usually if I've resorted to calling though, it's because I can't find out the answer from public sources. For example, "Can you accommodate this dietary requirement?", "Are you able to make dish X without ingredient Y?", "What sort of time of the day/week would be best for a romantic meal when you're not too busy?", "Are there any dishes you're out of, if we swing by in an hour or two?"

You can bet that these virtual assistants won't be equipped with enough knowledge, though I was impressed it knew there wasn't any outdoor seating (example in article).

Full knowledge is easy enough for 90% success. Just record every human to human conversation for a month and use a RAG or fine tune the model on the transcriptions.

Works okay until policies or other variables change. Then it's just confidently providing bad information which results in additional support time. And when it's wrong/lying 10% of the time what's the liability impact - what if the question is about handling allergens in food? Also updating that kind of knowledge base is going to be a nightmare.

> "Are there any dishes you're out of, if we swing by in an hour or two?"

> Full knowledge is easy enough for 90% success. Just record every human to human conversation for a month and use a RAG or fine tune the model on the transcriptions.

How could it possibly work that training on historical conversations would answer whether we are out of chicken today?

Well that’s the 10% it cannot answer. Most questions are much more mundane.

All of the mundane questions can be answered by going to the homepage.

The non-mundane questions are the ones you call for.

This is a solved problem for every customer-facing AI already. In this case, the chefs update the system prompt each day, either directly, or through a simple CRUD app.

I was at a hotel and called down to the front desk when an obvious “AI” answered. It was easy enough to ask for more towels but they never showed up, who knows why.

Maybe the request got sent to the housekeeping staff who knew that they could ignore it and blame the “AI”.

Maybe it got confused and thought it did what it asked. I didn’t think it was worth it to call back

That sounds great. If it can't be a reservation app, then at least give me an audio interface to it. Chatting with humans in their noisy, stressed restaurant environment for a low level data entry operation isn't an experience I'm clinging to.

If I call a restaurant and an AI answers, I'm going to call somewhere else.

I just don't like talking to machines.

I'll happily tap through the app, though.

But what if AI is better than humans, it will provide you the best service and out perform even the best human in the universe. then? would you still decline this AI ?

What if brussel sprouts tasted like Twinkies?

It can be jarring talking to an AI though. At first you think you're talking to someone very friendly, and then the impact that the entire conversation is artificial hits you. It feels like you're being lied to because that friendliness is coming from nowhere real.

This is a good point, because the "friendliness" of the host being paid to be friendly to you is completely genuine.

they're usually not though, just polite enough to get the job done and you can sense the real connection through that.

Similarly, when someone is being overly friendly to you, it feels strange. Now imagine a robot that does nothing but that automatically.

If I'm making mouth noises instead of filling out a form on a web site, a bot is unlikely to help.

There must be a clientele who resist making reservations online. Like my elderly parents. I dunno if there are enough of them to make it worth the effort.

I’ve had many times where a restaurant is officially booked online but I call them and say “hey, we’re looking for a table of two, we can come in right now and we promise to eat quickly and have the table turned around in 45 minutes”. Determining whether to allow that is very hard for an algorithm to do.

This is an interesting use case. I don't know if it's a deal breaker though, because most restaurants today don't accommodate this either, unless you're already there in-person.

Letting customers do this on the phone is a risk to the restaurant, because it relies on two things being true: (1) that you'll show up. Showing up in person is a big one -- many diners in urban areas game reservation slots by overbooking, so no-shows are fact of life; (2) that you will not take more than 45 minutes (or whatever duration that doesn't eat into reservation slots).

If you're already there in-person, it's less risky on the restaurant. Then it falls on staff's knowledge of average dining time (accounting for factors like group size, kitchen turnaround time, etc.). This can be codified in an statistical model, but if you're already there in-person, staff can make a call on whether they can fit you in.

For (1), humans can't make a good decision either, unless you're a regular and staff knows you. In theory, a machine can tap into OpenTable or Tock databases to check your no-show rate, but that data is often noisy and spotty.

That said, a restaurant reservation system only has limited degrees of freedom, so if this is a common exception use case, the algorithm can recognize it and escalate to human to resolve.

If restaurants let you do this today, it's likely that they're doing a coin-flip, knowing that they might lose the bet. If that's the case, algorithms can do slightly better than random -- there are reinforcement learning algorithms that can learn about the flakiness of their clientele over time.

Another way around this is selling tickets or taking reservation deposits, like what Alinea in Chicago does -- a $xx ticket to hold the spot which goes toward the cost of the meal. Nick Kokonas (co-owner of Alinea) did a podcast on this where he said that as soon as they did this, the rate of no-shows fell.

Yeah. My dad wouldn't make reservations online.

But this is almost certainly less and less common over time at least in the West.

The entire point is that when you speak on the phone to a person, you are dealing with a person, rather than an algorithm, because the algorithm is not human and cannot understand nuance.

I wish it could be the other way round

Thank God. Someone who speaks my language AND knows what they are talking about.

Lol what a waste of money

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