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McDonalds removes AI drive-throughs after order errors (www.bbc.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

105 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 3) 6 comments

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Who needs Ronald McDonald when you have managers like them?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

slaps own cheek

NAW!!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (7 children)

1: Does IBM even have an LLM that would be considered "good" these days? Maybe they do, but I haven't heard about it.

2: If this was in 2019, no wonder it flopped. Only very recently have we gotten to a point where this should've even been considered (and then, in my opinion given the current state of LLMs, dismissed).

3: More than 100 stores were testing this?? Did they not think to start with like, one store and see if that worked at all?

4: While a short-lived victory, this is still a win for people that rely on these jobs. Good for them.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

I used this system more than I care to admit and never had significant problems with it. My biggest issue was when trying to modify an existing item on the ticket.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Understanding the variety of speech over a drive-thru speaker can be difficult for a human with experience in the job. I can't see the current level of voice recognition matching it, especially if it's using LLMs for processing of what it managed to detect. If I'm placing a food order I don't need a LLM hallucination to try and fill in blanks of what it didn't convert correctly to tokens or wasn't trained on.