If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo
Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.
I don't think the problem was AI technology...
That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.
As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
If you're clarifying at this level, there are likely many other questions that you'd ask.
Whenever I took my kids there I told them "if you don't want it the way they make it then don't order it."
Hard to know for a fact without knowing where I live, I'm guessing :) FWIW, it's not true at McDonalds in Spain, they definitely have popular stuff sitting behind the counter for longer than the items you customize here.
Also, this is absolutely NOT a customer issue. It's a restaurant issue to clarify. Plain means different things at different restaurants, so the solution is to _always_ clarify exactly what the customer means.
I have this conversation enough that I now call out "plain no cheese" and ensure "no cheese" is written on the ticket.
Also "I'll take a number 3 meal plain" is void of an actual subject for the type of burger.
That's a fun regional difference with McDonalds it seems, we definitely have (literally) "Cheeseburger" as a independent item on the menu compared to "Hamburger" here in Spain: https://i.imgur.com/XDNuiUW.png
That's quite funny actually, Spain tends to translate everything and have everything in English, dubbed, but apparently the McDonalds Cheeseburger got to remain, and wasn't renamed to "Hamburguesa con Queso" as one would have expected :)
For a "cheeseburger" cheese is obviously integral. For a Big Mac, it's less clear but a "plain" Big Mac usually includes cheese.
For a fancy place's "deluxe Wagyu beef burger" that has cheese/truffles/a bunch of other stuff, a "plain" version will likely not have cheese.
Further, they _only_ showcase the "burger with cheese variant" in their combos and special. This further drives home that you should be thinking about cheese in the same way as toppings.
But one thing I know for sure, in Germany they are called Cheeseburger, not only called, but written as such on the menu.
in 2025 how is it so hard to make a user interface that doesn't lag like a bastard on every scroll/click/...
it's almost as bad as their terrible, terrible, terrible app
Because everything is done in fucking React or Node or Blazor or whatever the newest flavor of this wRiTe oNcE rUn aNyWheRe bollocks is, because it always, always, always the exact same fucking thing: abstracting UI elements to fucking goddamn JavaScript and running it in a browser.
And heaven knows McDonald's can't possibly pay for proper software development, they only made like 14 billion last year. They're barely scraping by.
I've taken over several react apps over the years and one thing I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly - as it should. Its very common for pages to take 10-60+ seconds to load, and when I look into it it's always obvious why they're so slow and easy to fix. The devs who made it just sucked.
I always have to remind people to add spinners, just because it loads instantly on your developer machine with a fiber connection (if not talking to a local container even) doesn't mean it will in the real world. But spinners only show when actively fetching so if it's fast they only show for a split-second. It's the best of both worlds.
What I might do is just add a global spinner using tanstack query, what I don't like is having 50 different spinners for every little component. Makes the site feel janky and weird.
I just don't see the point unless it's loading for 5+ seconds. If it's faster than that then the user won't have time to wonder if it's stuck anyway. And I prefer to have one or very few requests, rather than 10+ different ones for a single page.
Maybe in theory, but in practice I see it very rarely. Maybe it starts out great and fast and then devolves into a shitfest.
Given how frequent this is, maybe it’s time to actually blame the technology itself if it makes it so easy to mess up?
There is no programming language that you can't write slow code in.
Those kiosks are horrific and greatly reduced the number of visits I made to McDonald's. The insane pricing since then further reduced those visits to zero.
And the best way is just sit at the table, order with your phone and somebody brings the tray to you.
Massive LLMs had a breakout moment with chat, and now everyone has invested HARD into that technology while in fact there is really no good reason to think that massive models (billions of parameters, requiring billions of dollars to train, and requiring power-gulping servers to run) are needed or even preferred for most AI tasks.
We had algorithmic automation for all kinds of things in the 80s, and that has been steadily improving for everything from chess engines to computer vision to content suggestion ever since. Photo touch-up runs on handheld devices and is nearly instantaneous. Self-checkout is ubiquitous. Digital CNC and 3D printing is no longer to relegated to professionals, the point that amateurs can buy off-the-shelf solutions and start creating products with a few mouse clicks.
Billions is being spent on shovels in the current gold rush but are they really needed?
Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues
Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs> I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes.
https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?la...
Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard.
* Often lots of background noise
* Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic)
* People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out.
* People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu".
* The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me".
* It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food.
* Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.
Take automated phone menu systems, for example.
"If you are calling about X, press 1
If you are calling about Y, press 2
If you are calling about Z, press 3"
customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human
"I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9."
Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.
So size/scale is not as easy a concept to model in our minds as we might assume.