McDonald’s is removing artificial intelligence (AI) powered ordering technology from its drive-through restaurants in the US, after customers shared its comical mishaps online.
A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019.
It has not proved entirely reliable, however, resulting in viral videos of bizarre misinterpreted orders ranging from bacon-topped ice cream to hundreds of dollars’ worth of chicken nuggets.
In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order.
Lmao didn’t even know you could add butter to something at McDonald’s. If you can’t then it’s even funnier it decided that’s a thing.
Wasn’t this just voice recognition for orders? We’ve been doing this for years without it being called AI, but I guess now the marketing people are in charge
A computer: does anything.
Tech journalists: is this AI?
Voice recognition is “AI“*, it even uses the same technical architecture as the most popular applications of AI - Artificial neural networks.
* - depending on the definition of course.
It’s more than voice recognition, since it must also parse a wide variety of sentence structure into a discreet order, as well as answer questions.
Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian
Amazon!
You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.
An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn’t the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven’t been for decades at this point.
Ah yes, give me more companies using AI, trying to replace their employees and then realizing it doesn’t work
How come Walmart gets shit for self checkout but McDonald’s doesn’t get absolutely fucking roasted for Ai
Give me 5000 nuggets and bacon on muh ice cream.
drives away
These large companies really need to learn that AI isn’t a good tool for black and white decisions.
Right now I’m working on a system with drones and image recognition for farmers to prioritise where to use pesticides, in order to decrease the use of pesticides in the EU. For these things AI systems work really well, since it’s just prioritising regions.
It’s a bad idea to use it to make discrete decisions.
The problem is that they are just slapping a general use AI onto this and trying to call it a day. Had they created a completely custom model using exclusively recordings of drive-thru interactions it probably would have gone just fine
Unfortunately this is possible.
I think it’s for the better that companies are having these blunders though. It’ll generate some amount of pushback and keep AI from taking over workplaces.
I disagree. Classification in combintion wo ith a confidence score is a viable use case for AI.
Turns out customers weren’t ordering the McDeadly neurotoxin
I use the app to order then they bring it out to my car. No need to deal with people, fake or not.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just drop the speakers and make them use mobile apps only?
No, that would involve telling people to use a cellphone in a running car. Massive liability
…which is why I park first at the chain before I order. You right its a liability, but they’re gonna run out of options if they can’t afford someone to run the speaker, be it AI, someone in a call center, or the restaurant.
Why would they not be able to afford someone…? And run out of “options”…?
Isn’t this just voice recognition software?
Voice recognition vs. Download an app where you can’t make mistakes (and a giant corporation can harvest your data). Hmm, I wonder which mcway mcdonalds will go?
“Will you be using our app today?”
It’s like those self service kiosks they have. The first version was broken most of the time, but they got the bugs worked out and after that those kiosks were everywhere.
I don’t know which versions I’ve used but I’ve never had a problem with them. The only thing that was confusing is it seemed like it was forcing me to upgrade to a medium combo but they do this in the drive thru too. It may be that they don’t have small combos. I wish fast food services would standardize on size terminology. Where’s ISO and ANSI when I need them for actually useful things.
slaps own cheek
NAW!!
Bubble burst?
