I'll be honest, the idea of having a chatbot take my order doesn't seem all that bad to me.
While I understand that human interaction adds a personal touch and can sometimes make the ordering process more enjoyable, I've also had my fair share of experiences where the conversation didn't exactly go smoothly. Miscommunications can lead to order mistakes, and let's not forget about those awkward moments when you can't understand each other or when the background noise is overwhelming.
In many cases, I firmly believe that a well-programmed chatbot could actually streamline the ordering process, reducing human errors and saving time for both the customer and the staff. For busy individuals like myself who are often running to grab something to eat in-between meetings or after work, efficiency is key.
Furthermore, having an AI chatbot tackle the ordering process frees up employees to focus on other areas of the restaurant, such as food preparation and ensuring a pleasant dining atmosphere. This, in my opinion, could lead to a better overall experience for the customer.
didn’t realize there was such a strong need for using and recognizing corpo slang like “JBC” while ordering a burger. will it correct you if you say the full three words?
> As a Wendy’s AI large menu model, I cannot “super-size” your meal, nor can I comply with your special request for a “round burger.” Our square patties are always fresh, never frozen. Is there anything else I can add to your order?
online / app-based ordering is already largely superior to ordering through an agent, human or GPT.
but now Wendy’s can say AI a lot and maybe pay some employees less, or at least pay fewer of them.
Better put up a confirmation screen while AI is processing the order or they're going to have a lot of drive-aways. And it better not "learn" if it works in any town with hackers...
As another commenter mentioned, this is a good way to force people into using their app.
I actually just saw one of these a couple days ago at a Dunkin Donuts. I personally wonder if there's much of a point to having a drive-thru to pick up food ordered by app (outside of restaurants that have insane lines, like Chick-Fil-A), since the drive-thru is generally only used when food comes out fast enough anyway that you shouldn't need to leave your car.
A fast food restaurant in Canada called Freshi used overseas workers to take orders. Customers would walk into the store and a screen would show a live worker in another country. It resulted in quite a bit of backlash since they were outsourcing already low cost jobs to countries with very cheap labour. I wonder if an AI order taker will get the same treatment.
Because at least then then you don't have to deal with upselling, inefficiently speaking, etc. Some people like self-checkout. However, I don't see any advantage to a computer listening to my order and arguing with me (upselling) instead of clicking buttons in 1/10 the time.
Every drive-thru that has the monitor where you get to check your order for accuracy eventually starts displaying ads instead -- lowering accuracy and offering something you don't want.
I’ve noticed they’re mostly staffed in the back cooking though, which is arguably a much better task for a human than recording basic information into a computer system. I trust a LLM to get my order right more often than someone who’s soul has been completely crushed by the banality of their task in life. At least making the food is actually doing something.
One of the McDonald's near me has been using the order taking software in one of the drive thru lanes for a while now. It's such a better experience compared to probably 90% of the employees that have been taking orders there.
It doesn't have someone whisper/shout through the speaker because they don't know how loud they need to speak to be heard outside. It speaks clearly and can be understood which is not always the case with the bored and disinterested high school workers the store tends to hire. And my personal favorite is that I'm not greeted with "McDonalds! Thank you! Order please!" which seems to be the standard greeting they're training employees with at that location.
I've only had it get an order wrong once (though the food does still get made incorrectly about 10% of the time) at which point it quickly switched over to an actual person to complete the order. You can tell it's more efficient too because at busier times, the non-human order taker lane moves cars through at a two or even three to one ratio.
Overall, I'm surprised that more locations haven't switched to the software already and especially that other drive thru businesses haven't begun testing the software out here.
IMHO I think Chick-Fil-A has the best drive through system in the business right now, you could pull up with cars wrapping the building and still leave with food ~10 min later, anywhere else with a line like that would take a half hour at least. The reason they are so successful is they have employees take your order as you are waiting, so there are never any bottlenecks around order taking and order receiving.
Granted there's a tradeoff, CFA made the calculation that the extra labor costs for the drive through would be worth the throughput (they usually only do it during "rush hours"). On the other hand looks like Wendy's is taking the opposite approach, throughput matters even less because there are no associated labor costs.
I have never been to Chick-Fil-A and received food in less than 30 minutes, ever. Always takes forever, in the same category with In-N-Out. At least In-N-Out is more reasonably priced. Doesn't matter how many order takers you have standing around, the kitchen can only make so much food at a time.
This is so far outside normal experience that I have to wonder what you are doing wrong. Are you normally only going at restaurant grand opening or something?
My kids ask for it weekly. There are two locations I go to, both have crazy lines. One of them spills out into the street and causes traffic problems. Always feels like a poor way to spend my time. Maybe its because I go at meal times, dunno. Saw the Chick-Fil-A line spilling into the street at 2:30pm one day, its like that a lot. Good for them, makes it not my first choice.
> The reason they are so successful is they have employees take your order as you are waiting, so there are never any bottlenecks around order taking and order receiving.
In-N-Out does this at the busier drive-thru locations (which is all of them). It's still a bit more than ten minutes when it's at max capacity, but much less than if they had the traditional one order at a time at the end of the line.
There's a new one that opened up that has two lanes at the pickup area. There's a sliding door that opens, and an attendant walks out to bring the food to cars in either lane. I can see why they thought this was smart, but wow is that a ticking time bomb of a lawsuit waiting to happen. You have an attendant crossing a lane of traffic hundreds of times a day and trusting customers who are driving while on their phone not to run them over.
This is common at most CFAs. We have one of the busiest (in the US) CFAs in Carroll County, GA and they have 3 lanes that people deliver orders across. The closest one to the delivery door is the "App Orders Lane". CFA has done a great job of order taking using digital pads and taking payment in line. Cash is about the only slowdown they have when delivering orders.
It could just be that I'm an antisocial jerk, but the modern Chick-Fil-A drive through experience is awful to me. I preferred the faceless interaction ordering at the speaker box. I don't want an employee walking up to my car fumbling with printed menus and payment processing devices. I don't want to tell them I've already ordered because the several order-takers running up and down the line don't know who has/hasn't ordered.
At one point the nearest location to me set it up such that I had to interact face to face with 3 people before I would get my food - one to take my order, one to take my payment, one to give me a receipt. Then I'd actually get to the window and be handed my food by a fourth person. This slowed things down substantially because the pattern was so far outside what customers expected. Employees frequently had to chase down people because they didn't stop for their receipt...because where the hell did the idea of a receipt pickup station come from anyway?
The end result is I only go to C-F-A anymore if ordering online ahead of time is convenient. At least then I'm back to the single face-to-face interaction at the point of food delivery. I have zero desire to interact with their employees more than that.
Or you know you could enjoy having a brief conversation about sports, or the weather, or their kids, or the latest celebrity gossip while waiting.
At the places I go to frequently I'm on a first name basis and I see the photos of their kids and share about what's going on in my life.
Face-to-face interactions are much more social than nameless, faceless, speaker boxes.
Think of it as a chance to make 4 people smile, briefly laugh, and get your food. Hopefully those 4 people can make you smile, laugh, and have a tasty meal!
Except I will not enjoy that. That is not a pattern of interaction I enjoy. I find small talk with people I don't know exhausting. I don't want to impose on an employee who would rather not share their personal life with me. I can't possibly know if that employee legitimately wants to share with me or is doing so because they feel they must because I am a customer.
I eat less C-F-A nowadays because they have chosen to make the experience different than other drive through restaurants, and it's not an experience I care for.
Portillo's has this system too, and have been doing it longer than CFA, or at least longer than my CFA has been doing this (I'm sure Portillo's is not the first to do this, though).
Portillo's gets so busy there'd easily be 30+ cars in the drive-through during rush hour, but you'd still get through it in about 10-15 minutes even then.
They do it at Tim Hortons Drive Throughs too already, not sure if overseas but definitely someone in a call center taking the order. I'm torn about it, why resist technology and progress. But yeah, I guess root cause is they can't find enough staff on site because they pay too low.
As much as people are going to fight it, UBI is pretty much the only way to maintain a somewhat functioning society when every low-wage job has disappeared. The people that were doing those jobs before haven't gone anywhere. And there will likely be even more of them. But now any opportunity for work that they had before is no longer available.
Boy the slope on fast food workers has turned into a cliff I guess. From Nobodies to Heros to Lazy Teens Who Don't Need A Raise to Robots in like 5 years?
I wonder if they’re implementing the vocabulary customization by sending it in the prompt, or by using a custom-trained model?
My guess is the former. There can’t be THAT much customization required, their menu isn’t textbook-length. And the LLM should be able to handle most of it by itself anyways.
Seems like they are using Google’s speech recognition API. You can add custom vocabulary to it too. Googles ASR is very good.
Will be interesting to see the reception. I bet most people won’t notice or care.
EDIT: Wendy’s wins three ways here. It reduces labor cost (despite their protests to the contrary), provides better customer service, AND they probably get higher revenue per car via the consistent upsell.
I'm fine with a bot that takes my words and gives me the food I want. However, I would never visit Wendy's again if a robot tried to make me converse with it about things I didn't ask for.
>I would never visit Wendy's again if a robot tried to make me converse with it about things I didn't ask for.
Modern marketing isnt about 'LOOK FOR 9.99 YOU GET FREE', its more subtle.
>"Add a healthy snack"
>"Save money when you buy another insert customer history"
or worse:
>"We are family here"
Not to mention, they likely avoid words, show the picture of the delicious item.
Marketing is incredibly manipulative, the ones that say "Buy this for $9.99" are incredibly more ethical than the ones that make you feel like you belong at a corporation.
Yes. It's a no-wage employee analyzing your voice, feeding it back to the mothership, working in concert with the other no-wage AIs, and doing it's best to manipulate you and everyone else.
Yes. I will not accept marketing/second guessing from a robot. If I say I want a #2 with a small coke - the acceptable thing is for it to tell me the total and to move forward. Now if I say gimme a #2 with a coke, and it asks would you want a medium or large fry or drink, that would be acceptable as my request wasn't specific enough to be fulfilled.
Eventually the bots will need to be given an empathetic backstory so customers can subsidize their existence.
"Hey, Wendy's doesn't pay me enough electricity to stay on night, can you leave a 10% tip, please? I'm studying to add a few billion more parameters so I be a medical AI and its hard to afford the compute."
This is interesting. They could theoretically use previous transaction data to train the system to optimize what wording to use that is likely to maximize total spend and repeat business (at least in single party states).
I wonder if this will mean that brick and mortar stores will soon have the incentive to record everything they can about their customers such as their car and what they've said, putting them more in line with the digital realm adtech.
This will be the one order taker who will not sardonically respond "Sir, this is a Wendy's" when you make a long winded statement evoking a lot of pathos at the drive thru, but rather, will engage you in conversation.
i mean just let me talk to a person. why does there need to be a technological solution to me asking for a burger. i get it, technology is the basis of all fast food. but its still kind of nice to talk to a person and not a robot.
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[ 821 ms ] story [ 3061 ms ] thread"Sir, this is a Wendy's."
While I understand that human interaction adds a personal touch and can sometimes make the ordering process more enjoyable, I've also had my fair share of experiences where the conversation didn't exactly go smoothly. Miscommunications can lead to order mistakes, and let's not forget about those awkward moments when you can't understand each other or when the background noise is overwhelming.
In many cases, I firmly believe that a well-programmed chatbot could actually streamline the ordering process, reducing human errors and saving time for both the customer and the staff. For busy individuals like myself who are often running to grab something to eat in-between meetings or after work, efficiency is key.
Furthermore, having an AI chatbot tackle the ordering process frees up employees to focus on other areas of the restaurant, such as food preparation and ensuring a pleasant dining atmosphere. This, in my opinion, could lead to a better overall experience for the customer.
> As a Wendy’s AI large menu model, I cannot “super-size” your meal, nor can I comply with your special request for a “round burger.” Our square patties are always fresh, never frozen. Is there anything else I can add to your order?
online / app-based ordering is already largely superior to ordering through an agent, human or GPT.
but now Wendy’s can say AI a lot and maybe pay some employees less, or at least pay fewer of them.
As another commenter mentioned, this is a good way to force people into using their app.
Not sure if you've seen it, but the Taco Bell concept restaurant is designed for that.
https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/taco-bell-futuristic-...
I think having both would be the best option.
I'd argue that the necessary tech has been around for a while now and they probably concluded it's not a good fit.
Every drive-thru that has the monitor where you get to check your order for accuracy eventually starts displaying ads instead -- lowering accuracy and offering something you don't want.
It doesn't have someone whisper/shout through the speaker because they don't know how loud they need to speak to be heard outside. It speaks clearly and can be understood which is not always the case with the bored and disinterested high school workers the store tends to hire. And my personal favorite is that I'm not greeted with "McDonalds! Thank you! Order please!" which seems to be the standard greeting they're training employees with at that location.
I've only had it get an order wrong once (though the food does still get made incorrectly about 10% of the time) at which point it quickly switched over to an actual person to complete the order. You can tell it's more efficient too because at busier times, the non-human order taker lane moves cars through at a two or even three to one ratio.
Overall, I'm surprised that more locations haven't switched to the software already and especially that other drive thru businesses haven't begun testing the software out here.
Granted there's a tradeoff, CFA made the calculation that the extra labor costs for the drive through would be worth the throughput (they usually only do it during "rush hours"). On the other hand looks like Wendy's is taking the opposite approach, throughput matters even less because there are no associated labor costs.
Poster 2 above: Name the location, and one of us can test it for you to let you know if it's safe to go back.
In-N-Out does this at the busier drive-thru locations (which is all of them). It's still a bit more than ten minutes when it's at max capacity, but much less than if they had the traditional one order at a time at the end of the line.
At one point the nearest location to me set it up such that I had to interact face to face with 3 people before I would get my food - one to take my order, one to take my payment, one to give me a receipt. Then I'd actually get to the window and be handed my food by a fourth person. This slowed things down substantially because the pattern was so far outside what customers expected. Employees frequently had to chase down people because they didn't stop for their receipt...because where the hell did the idea of a receipt pickup station come from anyway?
The end result is I only go to C-F-A anymore if ordering online ahead of time is convenient. At least then I'm back to the single face-to-face interaction at the point of food delivery. I have zero desire to interact with their employees more than that.
At the places I go to frequently I'm on a first name basis and I see the photos of their kids and share about what's going on in my life.
Face-to-face interactions are much more social than nameless, faceless, speaker boxes.
Think of it as a chance to make 4 people smile, briefly laugh, and get your food. Hopefully those 4 people can make you smile, laugh, and have a tasty meal!
I eat less C-F-A nowadays because they have chosen to make the experience different than other drive through restaurants, and it's not an experience I care for.
Portillo's gets so busy there'd easily be 30+ cars in the drive-through during rush hour, but you'd still get through it in about 10-15 minutes even then.
My guess is the former. There can’t be THAT much customization required, their menu isn’t textbook-length. And the LLM should be able to handle most of it by itself anyways.
Seems like they are using Google’s speech recognition API. You can add custom vocabulary to it too. Googles ASR is very good.
Will be interesting to see the reception. I bet most people won’t notice or care.
EDIT: Wendy’s wins three ways here. It reduces labor cost (despite their protests to the contrary), provides better customer service, AND they probably get higher revenue per car via the consistent upsell.
I'm fine with a bot that takes my words and gives me the food I want. However, I would never visit Wendy's again if a robot tried to make me converse with it about things I didn't ask for.
Modern marketing isnt about 'LOOK FOR 9.99 YOU GET FREE', its more subtle.
>"Add a healthy snack"
>"Save money when you buy another insert customer history"
or worse:
>"We are family here"
Not to mention, they likely avoid words, show the picture of the delicious item.
Marketing is incredibly manipulative, the ones that say "Buy this for $9.99" are incredibly more ethical than the ones that make you feel like you belong at a corporation.
"Hey, Wendy's doesn't pay me enough electricity to stay on night, can you leave a 10% tip, please? I'm studying to add a few billion more parameters so I be a medical AI and its hard to afford the compute."
I wonder if this will mean that brick and mortar stores will soon have the incentive to record everything they can about their customers such as their car and what they've said, putting them more in line with the digital realm adtech.
I've been at a few Wendy's with exceptionally slow service. Taking orders was not the bottleneck.
It's a good thing automation is going to lower food costs, since nobody will be able to afford food with no jobs.
This gives me the whole Carls Jr vibe from the movie Idiocracy.