If an LLM can’t be trusted with a fast food order, I can’t imagine what it is reliable enough for. I really was expecting this was the easy use case for the things.
It sounds like most orders still worked, so I guess we’ll see if other chains come to the same conclusion.
This is a problem that requires zero AI.
A touchscreen kiosk is all you need to have the customer place their own order. You just need to have 2-3 ordering stations as they will be slower than trainer staff.
But shareholders demand AI
I still can’t add onions to my mcchicken on the kiosk. I demand humans back!
Touchscreen kiosks are hard to reach through car windows.
Of course, the real solution is banning drive-throughs because they’re fucking terrible urbanism to begin with:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/21/no-we-still-dont-need-drive-throughs
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/business/drive-thru-fast-food-chick-fil-a-urban-planning
People use touchscreens for accessing ATMs in the States.
Don’t see why this couldn’t be possible for fast food. There’s proven technology that already exists
Edit: Just to add, fuck cars. And fuck anti-urban infrastructure. Maybe we should do away with touchscreens for fast food, as well as other pro car infrastructure. At least not incentivize it
Man, I never used fast food, or drive throughs as much as I have since I developed a mobility disorder. Last week I put a pickup order in at my local coffee shop out of habit, and couldn’t carry both my coffee and the breakfast sandwich to my car at the same time. Which sounds so stupid, but it took so much extra energy for both trips into the store that I was ready to go home and call it a day after that lol
I know the answer is “don’t get fast food and just eat at home”, but I’ve also been so tired after work/school that I’m not eating, and I dunno what the answer to that is either. My state isn’t a place where people think about how to care for their communities, and most of it has hours of highway between “cities”
No it’s not. Well, at least not in terms of urbanism/mobility, anyway; YMMV on your household budgeting.
The answer is that you shouldn’t have to get in a car at all between your home and your local coffee shop to begin with. It should be no more than a short walk (or wheelchair ride or whatever), door to door.
It’s a mile, and across an interstate exit, to my nearest bus stop. And I live in the only city in the enormous state that takes public transportation seriously.
I think I feel bad when I read articles like the ones you posted, before this I’d cross the distances and not think much of it because my last two cities didn’t have public transportation. Now I can’t cross fast enough to beat the crossing light, and it’s so incredibly unsafe if I fall. I feel like the problem, I guess
Your first sentence contradicts your second. Clearly, there are zero cities in your enormous state that take public transportation seriously.
It’s crazy how most Americans have absolutely zero concept of just how bad even “good” infrastructure and city design in the US is, or how much better it could be.
They do not contradict each other. I’m certain there will be more stops as the city grows, because they keep improving it. I used to live in a city, in another state, with one of the best public transportation systems in the country, and they also kept improving that system to include the surrounding cities in other counties. Just because something isn’t perfect already does not mean we can’t take it seriously and strive for perfection
God damn. I was just about to invite you to the fuck cars community. In doing so, I needed the like with the !.
In trying to find it on the sidebar, I see you’ve found that community. As a mod.
Which means the whole basis for my comment is void before I even typed it!
On a similiar note…can you put the ! link in the sidebar?
LOL, guilty as charged!
If it’s the best solution to your problem, sure! But is it?
There’s nothing specific to !fuckcars about your request, so I’m not sure individual action by me is the right answer. Do you know of any examples of other communities that do the same? Have you made a thread somewhere like !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world proposing it as a standard convention? Have you filed a feature request suggesting that the built-in community link at the top of the sidebar be changed to display the fully-qualified name with exclamation point, or that a button be added next to it to copy the correct text to your clipboard, or something like that?
I’m not sure which mobile clients have this feature but with a browser, you can just type
!and the first couple letters of the community name. It’ll start offering suggestions to choose from and narrow those down as you keep writing out the name. Making a selection fills in the rest of the link markdown for you.I forgot that US cars are so massive that this is a problem.
Agree on the urban planning part.
You could basically get around this with 4 programmers and an expectation around word choice. Voice to text has improved massively, you could just require them to say menu items with modifiers
Not that I disagree about drive throughs in concept, but this is just another problem easily solved by anything but raw LLMs
Completely right. People forget technology like Amazon’s Alexa (not an endorsenent) existed before LLMs. Speech recognotion just got better.
yes… it’s improved dramatically.
which is why 18,000 waters got ordered instead of 8 (or whatever.)
Also software voice recognition and using this for a shopping cart/order placement system (via phone line) has been a thing since the early 2000s, i know some mail order shops in Germany who used this.
I actually don’t know why entering your own order hasn’t taken off more, come to think of it.
Chick-fil-A even went the other way, putting 4 high schoolers out in the weather for it. Cold, hot, raining, doesn’t matter.
With them I’m willing to just put it down to general crazyness.
That’s how my local Taco Bell is. If you don’t use your phone to place the order when you walk in there’s four kiosks you walk up to for placing your order. None of the people working are working the counter.
Most people have a hard enough time getting their car close enough to the window to get the food or to handle the card reader. I doubt many people would enjoy the toucn screen ordering as the would struggle tk get close enough and may have to lean way out of their window to order. The touch screen would also have to work reliably while wet or freezing cold.
Then you’ve got the issue of someone has to clean it and even with regular cleaning it has a huge potential to spread germs. Ultimately with all the disadvantages i think it would be too slow, too inconvenient, and add extra real estate to the drive thru.
Yeah, I guess you’d need some kind of arm or something to put the screen across. And then I guess you’d have to worry about it being damaged. Meanwhile, hiccups aside, an LLM is pretty much a drop-in solution.