I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
eco · 9h ago
I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
Jordan-117 · 8h ago
That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.
blibble · 8h ago
seems they took Dude, Where's My Car as an inspiration?
I would hope you can actually skip that automatically by ignoring the follow-up and immediately driving off to the next stage.
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
Mistletoe · 6h ago
I’ve always wondered if that battery spiel paid off. Do you have any stats? I never once was at Radio Shack and was like “yeah let me get some of your batteries” when they asked. Maybe I’m a fringe case.
conductr · 6h ago
Their battery business was strong even towards the end though, the "even if you're only buying batteries" part of the GP post subtly telling
redwall_hp · 2h ago
I've had minimal contact with drive-thrus in the past decade, because ordering ahead online is superior in every way.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 2h ago
Works when you actually have that option. Usually the only time I ever go to fast food places are late at night when everything else is closed. Most open-late fast food joints in smaller cities and towns will only have the drive through open, not the restaurant area.
PapaPalpatine · 9h ago
I have never heard someone describe drive-thrus as a “famously bad experience.”
BobbyTables2 · 8h ago
There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
EZ-E · 3h ago
I've always been puzzled that Starbucks drive through is a thing, and even has long queues. It's coffee, do people really drive there just to get a cup? I understand if it's along the highway but otherwise. You pay the premium of the brand without getting to see or enjoy the facilities. Just my feeling as european, maybe just a cultural thing.
midnightclubbed · 2h ago
Some people stop every day on the way in to work rather than make coffee at home in the morning. They’re often ordering some caffeine concoction rather than drip coffee. I have known people with $100+ per month Starbucks habits.
bee_rider · 2h ago
They make the dessert-coffee drinks that some folks like. Those can be kind of a pain to clean up after, with all the frothed milk and sugar…
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
midnightclubbed · 2h ago
Yeah it’s this, Starbucks isn’t a coffee place; it’s a caffeinated drink place. Their brewed coffee (outside of their higher end tasting room stores) is deliberately undrinkable to push you to their espresso drinks or their sugary concoctions.
dougSF70 · 2h ago
Its a flavored milk business that also sells coffee
fxtentacle · 1h ago
That’s spot on! I really like the chocolate milk at Starbucks. And sometimes I will get one with the optional shot of coffee added.
boogieknite · 2h ago
if youve ever been inside to listen to these kinds of orders these people WILL find a way to still take 3-4 minutes to order from an AI. if an AI can get those numbers down i want copies of those transcripts so i can learn how to do this myself
kevin_thibedeau · 4h ago
Most Wendy's without a kiosk have the cashier's chronically ignoring customers at the counter as online orders queue up from the receipt printer. I'm on a personal boycott for this shit tier service.
MangoToupe · 1h ago
I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of getting diabetes. Curiously, these same people often turn their nose up at equally-sugary soda. You'd think people would just learn to make this at home with a moka pot and a milk skimmer that costs less than what they paid for a single drink...
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
tstrimple · 30m ago
Honestly sometimes sitting in my car away from everyone for an extra 20 minutes without actually having to interact with anyone is exactly what I am looking for. No other demands on my attention. While waiting for my over priced sugar coffee concoction I can just relax for a bit.
acdha · 9h ago
They’re usually a lot slower than going inside and people have been cracking jokes about the quality of the speakers since the 80s.
MangoToupe · 1h ago
Interesting. I've found going inside to be much slower because the cashiers are so busy with the drive thru. I guess this probably varies from brand to brand, if not store to store.
PapaPalpatine · 9h ago
Yeah... that's just not the experience with drive-thrus in Central Ohio.
acdha · 9h ago
Maybe they’re less busy there but everywhere I went in California it was faster to park and walk inside if there was anyone in line ahead of you, which was almost always the case. The problem is that you’re limited by the slowest order ahead of you but the same place usually has multiple registers inside and the people who are waiting for pickup don’t block you from ordering. (Head of line blocking in real life)
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
Larrikin · 4h ago
When I worked at McDonald's in high school, the drive thru times were tracked (for manager shift bonuses) and the in store orders were not. Drive thru was always prioritized over in store if there was a possible wait on anything.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
Spooky23 · 4h ago
It’s worse now because fast food isn’t fast, and you end up committed with online ordering. You need to online order or pay a big premium, then you discover the drive through line is a trip to narnia only when you arrive.
micromacrofoot · 7h ago
people rather sit in their car for 15 minutes than walk for 1 to save 10
RogerL · 6h ago
Or because their kid or dog is in the car. Or because they have difficulty walking. Or because they just want to decompress and scroll their phone or listen to the news for 10 minutes. Or they hate crowds. Or they are immune compromised and don't want to be mingling with a bunch of people around a counter. Or they have social anxiety. Or they have a cold and just don't feel like getting out of their car. Or they are expecting a call from the baby sitter. Or they are having a fight with their spouse which they don't want to export into the public.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
micromacrofoot · 6h ago
people are allowed to make broad generalizations without listing caveats for every exception, this kind of pedantry is exhausting
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
midnightclubbed · 2h ago
I think your parent made a perfectly good point. Going into the store is a whole lot less pleasant than staying in my car and waiting a couple extra minutes in an environment I enjoy.
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
micromacrofoot · 7h ago
oh central ohio, well in that case it's definitely everyone else that is wrong
PapaPalpatine · 5h ago
Or maybe you and everyone else is of a certain age that y'all need to get your hearing checked more frequently.
Aurornis · 8h ago
The poor quality of drive through communication is a common joke because it’s such a universal experience.
goalieca · 8h ago
Hasn’t been the case since the 80s. Speaker tech works really well these days.
kadoban · 4h ago
Speakers work well if they're set up well, maintained well and used correctly. Most drive thrus sound like shit because none of those are true.
dawnerd · 45m ago
So the ai here isn’t what’s improving anything, it’s the companies forcing themselves to upgrade.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
loloquwowndueo · 7h ago
I disagree. First, there’s a 40-year chasm between the 80s and “these days”. Next - anecdata? I have found horrible drive thru audio systems in the past decade, let alone in the last millennium.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
collingreen · 4h ago
This is a crazy claim. I still routinely get bad speakers or mics, 40 years after your claimed cutoff. Where do you live? I expect you must have really great drive throughs pretty much everywhere near you in order to make this bold of a refutation of the comment above.
wheelerwj · 9h ago
Do you not know anyone who has been through an American drive-thru?
PapaPalpatine · 9h ago
I drive through them at least once a week. Ordering is not hard. Talking the order is a lot harder -- I've done that too.
HarHarVeryFunny · 9h ago
Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing.
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
beerandt · 8h ago
The follow up question (not quite mc) was actually what put it in a loop for me-
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
mark_l_watson · 9h ago
I agree, that would be just under 6% of all taco bells. The should have done a few in each region.
dangus · 3h ago
500 stores isn't really "scale," that's only about 6% of their locations.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
imtringued · 7h ago
Having a cat robot deliver food to your car in the parking lot would definitely be more efficient than drive through.
lordnacho · 7h ago
Why order when you arrive at the place? Just have people talk to their phones, and make sure the order has some sanity checks and orders something similar to what they can order online? There's less noise talking to your phone, and you can do it without being in line.
autoexec · 6h ago
> Why order when you arrive at the place?
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
pluto_modadic · 2h ago
a LARGE amount of /drive through specific/ food purchases are impulse purchases /as they're driving down the road/. You /don't/ want someone using an app to do that. It misses the mark of what actual customers are doing in favor of "let's do a cool thing because smartphones/AI exist".
jameslk · 7h ago
Some assumptions it seems you’re making:
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
redwall_hp · 2h ago
Yes, I would like to go to this restaurant that sets higher expectations of its customers.
micromacrofoot · 7h ago
still a significant number of people who can't use phones well enough to do this, and a bunch of other people who wouldn't want to download spyware to do so
wodenokoto · 1h ago
I feel like the article skips over all the interesting stuff. How did user out weird the AI? In what ways did they troll it?
jameslk · 9h ago
When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready
I feel like we watched different videos.. Seemed like the AI (or other monitoring system) recognized a problem with the 18000 cups of water order and quickly transitioned to a real human. That instance looked pretty production ready to me.
Dunedan · 1m ago
I suspect the human worker still had a headset to listen in to the orders at the drive-through and just intervened when she heard that order.
jameslk · 8h ago
I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
sneak · 8h ago
This is solved easily by one additional sanity check API call to a different AI. I’m not sure why people think these bugs are like, complete showstopper insurmountable things. It’s a quick fix.
Zagreus2142 · 8h ago
Taco Bell knows and controls it's own menu and the valid options are already directly encoded in their POS system, including purchase limits. Why would you call out to a different non-deterministic model instead of validating against the complete and deterministic data you have? Taco Bell can afford 1-2 engineers to manage that
jameslk · 8h ago
It seems so, and yet here we are
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
akerl_ · 8h ago
I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end.
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
nickthegreek · 8h ago
I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is installing tracking fast food mobile apps, creating accounts, giving emails, and even enabling notifications. Another capitalistic hellscape flimsly masquerading as a great deal for you.
stephenlindauer · 8h ago
Different folks have different levels of acceptable risk. I generally agree, and won’t install an app for every single one-time purchase, but I eat a lot of
Taco Bell. The app makes sense for me. Many other companies also have web interfaces so you don’t NEED to install an app. (Many restaurants/bars that have a Qr Code on the table act this way.)
smelendez · 8h ago
Yeah, and at least on iPhone you can limit location tracking to when you're in the app and disable notifications. My email address isn't particularly secret, nor is the fact that I grab a coffee and an Egg McMuffin every now and then.
computerdork · 4h ago
Well, you know, going to a drive-thru at a fast-food restaurant is already ultra capitalistic, so installing an app on a phone seems maybe just a little bit worse (and a great time savings).
Daz1 · 2h ago
"capitalistic hellscape"
get a grip lmao
seanmcdirmid · 8h ago
China has mobile ordering to the next level. Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
midnightclubbed · 2h ago
What was weird was when the restaurant was closed and looked deserted but you could still order online and hope the locker with your order lit up with your food (it did).
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
reaperducer · 8h ago
Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.
Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.
I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
seanmcdirmid · 2h ago
I’ve never seen un in the USA and it is pretty ubiquitous in China. Anyways, it would be cool if American companies would adopt them but it is probably horribly expensive to source them here vs in China.
bigstrat2003 · 8h ago
It's way more effort to order with a phone app than to just roll up and tell someone what I want. That's all there is to it, really.
rstuart4133 · 6h ago
My experience is different. If my wife goes to the counter and I order electronically, she is always done faster. This is doubly so if I use a phone app, because the app is painfully slow.
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
akerl_ · 8h ago
It seems hard to have empirical data here, but even just the parallelization of it seems to bias in favor of mobile ordering.
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
kenjackson · 1h ago
Some places, like ChikFila, seems to optimize their drive thru experience. That said the trick that I do with them is say that I’m at the restaurant well before I get there so I don’t have to wait.
twodave · 8h ago
It depends on the establishment, but some of us (actually I sort of doubt it’s a minority) rather enjoy speaking with other humans, even strangers, and even if it’s over an intercom.
akerl_ · 8h ago
I enjoy talking with humans, but not the part where I’m reciting an order and making them record it.
pluto_modadic · 2h ago
if you drive down the road and decide on a whim to pull into a restaraunt, you shouldn't be looking down at your phone as you order. fast food is for impulse purchases.
hypeatei · 8h ago
With mobile ordering it's hard to tell where you are in the queue or where you will be I guess. In the drive thru, at least you can see how many people are in front of you and they're making orders chronologically.
BHSPitMonkey · 1h ago
... Except while you're on your way to the line (or waiting to get through it), other customers' mobile orders are being accepted and you still aren't sure of the order in which they're being prepared.
akerl_ · 8h ago
Chick-fil-A is the best at this: you mobile order but they make the order once you’re in line, so the food is made chronologically.
toofy · 8h ago
the number of places that beg me to install an app is ridiculous. if i installed an app from every single place that begs me to my phone would probably shut down in protest from the thousands of apps i’d have cluttered everywhere.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
throwaway314155 · 8h ago
The apps that are deliberately designed to lure you in with deals/coupons so that they can more accurately track you and likely sell this data to data brokers?
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
akerl_ · 8h ago
I said mobile ordering and you transmogrified it to “apps”, but I’ll play along with the strawman.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
sneak · 8h ago
You can’t pay in cash via an app.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
bluedino · 8h ago
Buy a gift card across the street at CVS. Literally had to do that before.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
sneak · 8h ago
You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. Additionally, the ability to pay in cash isn’t needed for buying coffee, it’s needed for paying for legal defense, publishing, transport, and a bunch of other things. The issue isn’t that Starbucks is cashless; the issue is that when all of society goes cashless (because places like Starbucks did) then we are all capital-f Fucked.
Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
akerl_ · 8h ago
I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.
grishka · 8h ago
What about international travelers who don't have an internationally accepted payment card because their home country was mostly isolated from the banking system in a mostly futile attempt to punish its government?
akerl_ · 8h ago
I don't think cash is saving anyone from the knock-on effects of international sanctions on their citizens. The same people who don't have access to a Visa because they're citizens of a sanctioned country aren't in a position to easily turn their local currency into USD, and the ways they'd start to earn money outside of the sanction bubble overlap the ways they'd get an internationally accepted payment card.
grishka · 7h ago
You can freely exchange Russian rubles to US dollars and back. Many people I know travel like that.
justsomehnguy · 7h ago
Makes me wonder how fast you would change your mind you would get locked out of your cashless method of payment.
Yes, I it happened to me and it wasn't pleasant.
sneak · 8h ago
Most people are, because they don’t realize that when all transactions must be done without privacy and only at the pleasure of the state, the free society that you have come to take for granted will cease to exist.
I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:
That’s certainly a possibility. But no, I don’t think a lack of cash will cause society as I know it to cease to exist.
ugh123 · 8h ago
In a way, we need these "pioneers" who operate at scale to serve the dual goals of giving lessons learned to future developers of AI tech, and proving to us that the technology is just not ready to supplant this kind of work.
testing22321 · 8h ago
Exactly. Identical to early self-checkout at the supermarket and a million other examples.
gerdesj · 8h ago
"Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta:"
nutanc · 1h ago
This is just a glimpse of the future. The real future is when your self driving car talks to the Taco Bell AI and gets your Taco.
electric_muse · 9h ago
What’s wild is that drive-thrus are one of the few places where humans actually expect and even forgive a little chaos. You get muffled voices, wrong items, and confusion, and nobody is shocked. Dropping AI into that environment is less about tech maturity and more about customer psychology.
They clearly hired the wrong consulting firm / AI agent stsrtup
gerdesj · 8h ago
Possibly, but they did manage, without consultants: "Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta".
That's a high score.
bitlad · 8h ago
I guess the company it is a Voice AI company went from 0-10M ARR in weeks and boasted about it in linkedin.
ww520 · 8h ago
Have they heard about staging roll-outs and A/B testing or Multi-Armed Bandit testing?
jrowen · 5h ago
I'm gonna be that guy - was this article written by AI? Where were the actual clever/funny/bizarre anecdotes that the (IRL) Darwin awards are known for?
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
joshdavham · 8h ago
So AI will replace software engineers but not fast food workers because that work is too complex for AI?
hackable_sand · 8h ago
Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.
Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.
But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).
Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.
What is that worth?
ares623 · 4h ago
The more people behind the counter, the less people outside starving or looting
toofy · 6h ago
i definitely prefer to order from a person. for a few different reasons:
1) i kinda like people.
2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.
3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.
3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.
4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.
5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.
we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.
anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”
people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.
autoexec · 6h ago
I don't really like people or interacting with them, but I know that the wage slave taking my order doesn't give a shit about me and will forget about me the moment I leave. A company using AI will be far more likely to be collecting my voice print, analyzing my speech to build a psychological profile on me, A/B testing everything from their word choices, inflection, and sales pitches to get me to spend more, etc.
The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial
toofy · 6h ago
yeah this should have been on my list as well.
just let me buy an order of fries without the fries having some creepy behind the scenes motivations. just let me order an oreo shake and i’ll give you $4.
the restaurant should focus on making their oreo shake better than the other restaurants, not the stack analyzing my order history.
No comments yet
hackable_sand · 4h ago
Makes sense to me.
The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.
It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.
I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
toofy · 1h ago
> I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
absolutely. the things you learn/absorb in that kind of atmosphere are entirely different than what we learned in school social activities. you learn how to deal with coworkers having a bad day, shitbag bosses, how to differentiate if a customer is a true unempathetic dbag or just a regular person having a bad day.
and one of the most valuable lessons you learn to the absolute core, you absorb this to be one of the great truths: one nice person can take one of the worst hellfilled days of your life, and with a single snap of their fingers your day turns around. from one quick interaction with a nice person. and it happens regularly because at the end of the day, an absolute fuckton of people are kinda awesome.
the things you pick up about the world and about other people are invaluable tools that a lot of people are lacking (and it shows.)
…apparently i just entirely and verbosely over analyzed why i like to order my fries in person?
“and that my dear fellows is why it’s important to always order your milkshake in person. i now cede back any remaining time.”
imtringued · 7h ago
>Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.
What is manufacturing.
hackable_sand · 4h ago
Food food
smnplk · 8h ago
They were smart and didn't upload their process to github, didn't write any books or tutorials on fast food ordering process. So AI could't learn the craft. ;)
joshdavham · 2h ago
I’m sure Taco Bell must’ve had a bunch of training data, at least!
MehdiHK · 6h ago
Moravec's paradox
micromacrofoot · 7h ago
> deliberately trolling the AI with absurd orders that would make even experienced drive-thru workers question their life choices
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkdyU_eUm1U
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
get a grip lmao
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.
I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
Yes, I it happened to me and it wasn't pleasant.
I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:
https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065391 - Aug 2025 (186 comments)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY
That's a high score.
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.
But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).
Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.
What is that worth?
1) i kinda like people.
2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.
3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.
3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.
4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.
5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.
we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.
anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”
people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.
The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial
just let me buy an order of fries without the fries having some creepy behind the scenes motivations. just let me order an oreo shake and i’ll give you $4.
the restaurant should focus on making their oreo shake better than the other restaurants, not the stack analyzing my order history.
No comments yet
The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.
It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.
I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
absolutely. the things you learn/absorb in that kind of atmosphere are entirely different than what we learned in school social activities. you learn how to deal with coworkers having a bad day, shitbag bosses, how to differentiate if a customer is a true unempathetic dbag or just a regular person having a bad day.
and one of the most valuable lessons you learn to the absolute core, you absorb this to be one of the great truths: one nice person can take one of the worst hellfilled days of your life, and with a single snap of their fingers your day turns around. from one quick interaction with a nice person. and it happens regularly because at the end of the day, an absolute fuckton of people are kinda awesome.
the things you pick up about the world and about other people are invaluable tools that a lot of people are lacking (and it shows.)
…apparently i just entirely and verbosely over analyzed why i like to order my fries in person?
“and that my dear fellows is why it’s important to always order your milkshake in person. i now cede back any remaining time.”
What is manufacturing.
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!