AI Taking Fast Food Orders
February 22nd, 2019Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
“The system takes a lot of friction out of interactions between customers and employees,” Carpenter said, noting that the AI was designed to sound like an amiable woman’s voice. “The AI never gets offended and it will just keep talking to you in a very calm and friendly voice.”
There’s an immediate benefit for employees as well, Carpenter maintains.
“Over the course of an eight-hour shift, they don’t have to repeat the same welcome language hundreds of times,” he said.
Intelligent, interactive machines, once the stuff of sci-fi movies and futuristic fantasy, are quickly becoming a reality, especially in the fast food dining world, where repetition rules and improvisation is limited. In restaurants around the globe, machines are already taking orders, flipping burgers, preparing pizzas, pouring stiff drinks and cooking entire meals in full view of hungry customers.
Those poor bastards that have to spout the greeting they are ordered to do: “This is Jack in the Box at 1111 1st Street, home of the blah, blah, blah, would you like to try our new tasty, fruity, creamy blah blah blah today???” and they spit it out so fast, because they want to get it over with, that I can’t understand what they said, so I have to ask them “Is this Jack in the Box?
I might be worse with AI, because then the greeting will be said slowly and distinctly where you can understand it, but it will take 2-3 minutes for it all to be said, just like the stupid automatic phone greetings that you have heard a thousand times and can’t stand to wait thru anymore.
And “Get the hell off of my lawn, kid, you’re bothering me!”