Next they'll come for the cooks:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc</a><p>There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.<p>Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.<p>Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.<p>Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
Why would I order with my <i>voice</i> by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that?<p>Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine.<p>Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at <i>McDonalds</i>, but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched.<p>I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric.<p>Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment!
I cannot wait. Finally, going to McDonald's will lose all semblance of visiting a restaurant, and be fully realized as the experience of receiving various permutations of bleached flour, HFCS, and sad meat from a giant red and yellow robotic playdoh factory that it was always meant to be.<p>One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added.
Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - <a href="https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acquistion-of-Apprente-a-voice-based-tech-start-up/" rel="nofollow">https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu...</a><p>@dang can we get the URL changed?
I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands.<p>I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc.<p>What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order.<p>I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
"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."<p>Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
I wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered).<p>Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.
The local economist has been ascribing this move to the $15 minimum wage. His take is that the only way fast food can stay profitable, with the higher minimum wages, is automation. Computers cost less than people.
Whimsically, I’d like to see this system only take orders in Japanese.<p>Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is).<p>Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations.<p>But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian.<p>M:いらっしゃいませ<p>C:ハンバーガーを1つくださ<p>M:はい
At many fast food restaurants, especially the less busy one, the person taking drive through orders is multitasking. I've seen people run the front register and the drive through ordering at the same time.<p>It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could.
I've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering.
Why not just use a call center for this? Someone pulls up to the speaker, and someone in another part of the world takes their order and puts it into the restaurant’s system. Surely that would be easier and have a greater chance of success than voice gen?
Lots of people here are saying they should just use a phone app.<p>I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily.<p>There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high.<p>Maybe a kiosk would work though.
I'm about 99.99964% positive that a key point behind voice (and touchscreen) sales interfaces will be to integrate upsell and/or advertising into the transaction consistently.<p>Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells<p>Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
"What drinks do you have?" "Can I get combo without the drink?" "How much cheaper is it with a water?" "My kid wants the rainbow Happy Meal toy, can we have that one please?" "What time did you stop serving breakfast?" "Do you still have McFlurries? What flavors are there?"<p>This won't go well.
Up to 2 years ago our local McDonalds drive-in used to have a separate booth where you interacted with a person when you placed an order.<p>Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure.
Ironically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte.
Those of you who are touting use of the McDonald's app: have you bothered to look at the <i>permissions</i> you are granting to the contents and usage of your phone in order to use the app?
Logical turn of events though, everything goes to human replacement by robots and/or AIs in many kind of manufactures. Total human replacement by robots is a matter of time I believe.
Great another move to remove the human touch of service from the food industry. If anything I feel like we're still a few years away from being able to have AI sophisticated enough to mimic conversion for people to comfortable enough to use daily for even simple tasks such as taking orders.
> McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs<p>So that's a lie.<p><a href="https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli-founded-Apprente-to-accelerate-drive-thrus-601292" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli...</a><p>Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out?<p>Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out?<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistance-journey-of-a-fastfood-order.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...</a><p>Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when.<p>This article contributes nothing.<p>All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet.