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.
McDonald’s told franchisees it would remove the tech from the more than 100 restaurants it has been testing it in by the end of July, as first reported by trade publication Restaurant Business.
Of course it wasn’t ever gonna work; the sound quality of typical drive-thru intercom systems is too shitty even for humans to understand half the time!
That’s an interesting point. AI has a current limitation of not knowing that it doesn’t know something.
This is not a current limitation, this is an inherent and systemic limitation of the underlying technology itself. Future AI might be different but it won’t be based primarily on LLMs then.
That’s reading more insight into my comment than I actually had, but sure. Overconfident AI that tries to extract orders from an intercom feeding it staticky gibberish could be part of the problem, too.
'Course, considering how many times I’ve had AI phone tree systems tell me something to the effect of “sorry, I didn’t understand that response” even when the audio quality is decent makes me think they might have accounted for that part.
I was mainly just bitching about how drive-thru intercoms suck in general, while assuming that McDonalds probably didn’t upgrade them as part of the experiment. I can just imagine the overpaid IBM sales consultant confidently telling McDonalds “sure, you can use the same intercom hardware; the software will correct for it!” while the actual engineers who have to implement the damn thing facepalm in the background.