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.
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.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be that complex:
- X <menu item> [<ala carte | combo meal>]
- extra <topping>
- <size> <soda brand>
There’s probably a dozen or so more, but it really shouldn’t need to understand natural language, it can just work off keywords.
You can do that kind of imposed structure if it’s an internal tool used by employees. But if the public is using it, it has better be able to parse whatever the consumer is saying. Somebody will say “I want a burger and a coke, but hold the mustard. And add some fries. No make it two of each.” And it won’t fit your predefined syntax.
Idk, you could probably just show the grammar on the screen, and also allow manual entry (if insider) or fallback to a human.
That way you’d get errors (sorry, I didn’t understand that) instead of wrong orders with a pretty high degree of confidence. As long as there’s a fallback, it should be fine.
Anyway, that’s my take. I’m probably wrong though since I don’t deal with retail customers.
