Taco Bell says “no más” to the experience of the Drive-Thru

Last year, Taco Bell made a simple bet that Alexa type voice assistants could manage the window at the wheel. He did not consider if people could manage the essentials with AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company integrated AI into the driving boxes in more than 500 locations across the country and quickly found that it made mistakes, frightened people and was very easily manipulated.

“We learn a lot, I’m going to be honest with you,” said Dane Mathews in chief of the Taco Bell, Dane Mathews. One of the lessons: people really like to play with AI, like ordering “18,000 cups of water, please”. If you browse Taco Bell Reddit (a surprisingly dynamic community), there are employees and bell heads that deplore the takeover of the AI. An employee displayed that the AI ​​assistant had started to tell people that the restaurant was from everything except drinks and sauce packs. A person who tries to order a supreme chalupa with onions from the AI ​​assistant found himself with three bezhables, and when they tried to replace the meat with beans, the AI ​​simply refused.

So things are not going well, but that does not prevent Taco Bell from moving forward with his embrace AI in one way or another. The parent company of Fast Food Staple, Yum Brands, announced a partnership with Nvidia earlier this year in order to improve technology that feeds its operations on AI, including controlling.

Taco Bell is certainly not alone in this effort either. McDonald’s began to infuse its operations with AI earlier this year, in order to improve the accuracy of the order. Wendy has teamed up with Google to bring an AI chatbot to its driving windows, and specifically started to form the model on Wendy’s specific jargon so that he knows that JBC “is short for” Junior Bacon Cheeseburger “. White Castle also embarks on action, bringing the AI ​​to more than 100 of its steering wheel with the help of the Soundhound Word.

A quick scan suggests that these efforts are taking place as well as the Taco Bell experience. McDonald’s would have abandoned some of its AI interactions with customers after continuing to spoil the orders. People also went to social networks to complain about having to face the Wendy AI cat, finding it inaccurate and scary.

All this seems to lead to an inevitable conclusion which is entirely counter-intuitive at the height of the AI. Mathews, Taco Bell’s Tech Guy, told Wall Street Journal that when a restaurant is super busy and has long lines, it is preferable for humans to manage it. It turns out that replacing people with AI should not be on the menu.