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Wendy’s tests an AI chatbot that takes your drive-thru order

2 pointsby psychanarchabout 2 years ago

1 comment

tjrabout 2 years ago
<i>Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I’m skeptical about how this works out in the long term. People can barely handle the cashier-less kiosks at Mcdonald’s, and now you want them to talk to an AI?</i><p>I&#x27;m generally ambivalent or even opposed to introducing LLM user interfaces all over the place, since I find communicating with computers via natural language to usually be more cumbersome than using existing interfaces.<p>But here&#x27;s a case where I think it probably makes sense. Customers at a drive-thru are already expecting to speak out a natural language order, and increasingly drive-thrus have some sort of digital display that shows back what the customer ordered, so they can confirm if it was right or not.<p>In the case of the indoor kiosk, you&#x27;re introducing a totally different interface mechanism. People walk in to a restaurant expecting to speak out an natural language order, and instead have to fiddle around with a custom UI that they probably only ever see inside that restaurant.