The videos where people try to do the 10,000+ drinks are pretty funny but the ones where people are just straight up frustrated their order isn't getting interpreted correctly are also telling [1]. I've also heard of employees intentionally breaking these kiosks or AI things in this way just to make their own job easier because these things messing up all the time are just getting in the way of their burger flipping and making things complicated. I thought they kept beta testing of new flavours to a few locations in Orange County, you think they'd do the same for large software rollouts
But the not funny part is the (shitty) use of dark-patterns.
Note the prompt-on-repeat is "and your drink?" instead of "would you like a drink with that?"
Someone here clearly wrote the prompt as "Be sure to end each order with an assume-yes drink upsell", not considering that some orders may already include a drink.
They're so hyper-focused on institutionalizing all the upsells that they don't consider the experience. I mean, I guess institutionalizing the upsells is the only way a system like this can pay for itself (easier to work out the kinks in a single AI system instead of training a million minimum-wage minimally-engaged humans), but these growing pains show how shitty it's all going to become.
I went through phone support hell yesterday with T-Mobile who is also using a bot now rather than a normal phone tree. It even dynamically generated "phone-tree-like" options later on in different orders and depth later on, all incorrect. It was pure wtf.
me: "I need to swap sims"
bot: "Ok, how do you want to apply your bill payment"?
me: "No, sims"
bot: "Ok your payment options on file are XXXXX"
me: "Are you fucking retarded"
bot: "I see you have a trade-in, do you want to help with your trade in?"
me: "......"
Yea, had to go to a store. I am porting out of shiT-Mobile to Google Fi in a few weeks.
Angrily request an operator and threaten to sue. That will elevate the priority if any sentiment analysis is in place and get you into the queue for a human.
In case you are switching for better coverage, Google Fi now only uses T-Mobile towers. In my experience in a rural area, it's declining in coverage so badly that I'm switching carriers.
If you watch the actual video[0], you'll see that it's not that dramatic. Man says "18 thousand water cups", the AI appears to transfer the customer to an employee, who immediately picks up and takes over.
There was never an actual order of 18,000 water cups. The AI did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of the system.
I don't think that's what happened at all. It sounds like somebody was monitoring the 'AI' and then cut off the software right as it was about to respond. You can hear it start to say something, that sounds a whole lot like 'okay', before the mic swaps over to a person.
If users can always fail out the AI, why have the AI? Users will learn and socialize how to obtain a human. The human did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of their time.
If you're asking seriously... Because, as the AI continues to improve, more and more users will choose not to fail out intentionally, reducing the required level of human staffing for a certain number of customers / orders. It's just like today - there are some users who will keeping "hitting 0" to get to a human, but many others who won't.
Why have an automated phone system if someone can get a human operator by pressing 0? Because the automated system works for typical interactions, and reduces the labor load of the human to only handling edge cases.
This sounds strange? If I were to build this system (without really having time to think about it), I'd let the AI "build" the order, which would impose some hard limits - like not accepting 18 000 items. Then I'd have the user confirm it without any AI involvement, so you wouldn't end up with bacon in ice cream. This sounds like they just connected an AI directly to ordering functions and that's it?
Yes, we need to build deterministic systems that the AI can work within.
I wonder if we'll ever use AI to write code in dependently typed languages. Dependent types can check almost anything at compile time; they can check that a function returns only sorted data, they can check that the submit_order function only submits valid orders--again, they can check this at compile time.
So, we could express a variety of high level constraints and let the AI go wild, and as long as the resulting code compiled, we would know it was correct, because the type system confirms it.
If we also include an effect system, then the type system could say things like "this function will return a valid Sudoku puzzle solution, and it will not access the network or filesystem", and then, if it compiles, we know the those conditions will hold at runtime.
That’s the dream with dependent type systems, but from my very limited exposure to them, it seems like it’d be very difficult to encode complex constraints like all of your company’s business logic in this way.
Not saying it can’t be done, but I think it’s a bit telling that no such language has ever caught on.
Unit testing can also be used to verify such constraints and is much simpler. It obviously doesn’t guarantee correct behavior like a proof, but if the tests are comprehensive, it can do a great job.
Missing some kind of hard limits is a huge miss. Presumably the 99th percentile of a Taco Bell order is like $100 and/or 20 items. Anything more than that immediately gets a verbal confirmation and/or defers to the human operator.
You seem to think the execs who decided to push this gave their dev teams any leeway to spend time working out this sort of basic user experience. They gave a ludicrous deadline and the tech folks had to drop everything to meet it, and stuff like “what happens if it makes a mistake” were not considered.
I mean, if you're doing all that _work_, at a certain point why bother with the LLM? The marketing promise of LLMs is "it's just magic", and unfortunately people do tend to believe the marketing.
I used to regularly go to my local Taco Bell, but stopped going after they rolled this out. Not mad at them or anything, it was just sometimes a frustrating experience, and overall I was not sure how I felt about it: it's more impersonal, I wondered if it meant less jobs available in my local community, etc. So without making a conscious decision, I just stopped going.
I wonder how this has affected sales and net profit at their locations using AI in this way.
It seems crazy to me to not filter the order through a "reasonableness check", and if it fails that, a human is brought into the transaction.
When I was at Caltech, institute policy was that if you solved an exam problem, and came up with not just a wrong answer but an absurd answer, you would get negative credit rather than a zero.
The way to get just a zero is to annotate with "I know the answer is absurd, but I cannot find the mistake".
Here in California the cost of fast food skyrocketing and the service experience plummeting started after the introduction of a $20/hr minimum wage for fast food jobs made replacing workers with kiosks, automation and AI more economical. I've also noticed many stores have shortened their hours to center on peak traffic periods - which sucks for those of us with unusual schedules.
I've also recently had more than one sandwich shop visit where there was a huge line and wait simply because there was only one employee on duty making sandwiches, running the register and taking to go orders on the phone. It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral. Fast food used to be the "starter job" for local teens living at home who weren't going off to college where they could score internships. Now there are far fewer of those jobs and the remaining ones have reduced hours. Plus with fewer positions and less hours to fill employers are less likely to hire teens with zero work experience at all.
Here in Pennsylvania, the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour, but the Burger King near me is paying $11.96/hour for new "team members." Every fast food place and gas station around here started paying over $10/hour and often $15/hour for new hires during COVID. Retirees earning some extra cash made up a good number of their staff before that, but I rarely see them anymore. I guess they quit to stay safe and have since adjusted to their new budgets. That plus the tight labor market following COVID meant competition for employees was fierce.
>It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral.
I've also noticed a quality drop in almost every aspect of fast food here: slower service, more mistakes, higher prices, shorter hours. It's like the owners are trying to inch more into cutting costs without going over the edge and losing too many customers. Personally, if I want something "familiar" while traveling, I now do take-out from a steakhouse chain. Only costs a small amount more, but accuracy and quality are so much better. At home, fast food is just too expensive to make sense.
>"*RETIREES* earning some extra cash made up a good number of their staff before that
Are you sure they were retired? Almost every senior citizen I've spoken to in service jobs has told me that they're hired there because it's the only job that would take them - and they didn't get to see retirement.
The $20/hr wage is only an 18% bump over the normal CA minimum wage, and it came at the tail-end of the pandemic... So A) it just replaced the "hero pay" and B) fast food prices had already been climbing due to supply chain issues, inflation, and veiled corporate profit-taking.
The kiosks were just the threat fast food companies used to try to push-back on the proposed law, and when lawmakers called their bluff, there were some deplyments, but not everywhere, and in general fast food employment has gone UP (not down) since then.
"the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed California had approximately 750,000 fast food jobs, roughly 11,000 more than when the higher minimum wage law took effect."
I'm not seeing the shorter hours you are. Might be unrelated to wages. There was a general decline in fast food sales across the country (not just in CA) because of the crazy corporate price hikes (which consumers pushed back on).
I mean, I'm a Housing Theory of Everything guy, so, yea, the high minimum wage here is just part of the over all inflation spiral that is being fueled by the fact that there isn't enough housing for the people who want to live here, in places people want to live. It makes sense that we'd end up with more employees making these higher wages, because it's an inflationary spiral, not a supply-demand issue.
It's just the effects of everyone here trying to address this inflation for folks at the lower end of the earning spectrum, but without actually addressing the underlying issue (god forbid we allow multifamily housing next to major transit corridors), which is obviously the massive inflation in housing costs caused by the massive, near-statewide shortage.
I don't begrudge folks trying to make a decent wage. I also have to agree that it seems a few factors have all combined to make the experience pretty bad for the consumer.
Order kiosks, long waits for food, skyrocketing prices all contribute to choosing other options. If you're going to spend $15+ per person and it still takes 30 minutes to order, wait, and eat youre alternative comparable options are greatly expanded and people are chosing to go to independent cafes for better food and experience at the same price point.
I do think some automation is useful. For example, being able to order a sandwich online is very convenient because the visual UX makes it easy to be specific and clear about what should and shouldn't go on the sandwich. Communicating that verbally is more prone to mistakes.
The problem is that the economy is good. Hot waitress index is objectively correct and all the servers I get are ugly as fk and low quality.
I’m waiting for the next recession and desperately wanting myself to not be impacted so I can finally expect shit to stay open late again and not be ran by a skeleton crew.
> Here in California the cost of fast food skyrocketing and the service experience plummeting started after the introduction of a $20/hr minimum wage for fast food jobs made replacing workers with kiosks, automation and AI more economical.
They've also done it in places where minimum wage is still $7.25, so it's not the wages that are the issue.
I recently watched a YouTube video where some guy tested these AI drive-throughs with ridiculous requests and every time a human operator would intervene. They seemed quite restrictive in their ability to "converse" (which is good IMHO).
FWIW the takeaway from the Taco Bell employee:
He didn't like it. He used to take and process all drive-through orders, now he only handles people with problems.
I mean the dream for these deployments is that a bank of humans that can handle the ordering for every store but if that worked you could just do that right now. An autonomous system that can handle easy orders is just a nice bonus.
It's excruciatingly clear that as impressive as LLMs are, they're still very much an experimental technology. While multinational corporations like Taco Bell should be experimenting with such technologies, they should be experimenting with them in research labs, not shoving them in front of customers and being surprised by the consequent reputational damage.
Companies have no respect for customers any more. They're sure people will put up with whatever nonsense they come up with, especially if is in the name of "AI advancement". The reality is that executives are far more interested in how their stock grows on the news they're using the latest AI.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bsTFEgFAAjY
But the not funny part is the (shitty) use of dark-patterns.
Note the prompt-on-repeat is "and your drink?" instead of "would you like a drink with that?"
Someone here clearly wrote the prompt as "Be sure to end each order with an assume-yes drink upsell", not considering that some orders may already include a drink.
They're so hyper-focused on institutionalizing all the upsells that they don't consider the experience. I mean, I guess institutionalizing the upsells is the only way a system like this can pay for itself (easier to work out the kinks in a single AI system instead of training a million minimum-wage minimally-engaged humans), but these growing pains show how shitty it's all going to become.
me: "I need to swap sims"
bot: "Ok, how do you want to apply your bill payment"?
me: "No, sims"
bot: "Ok your payment options on file are XXXXX"
me: "Are you fucking retarded"
bot: "I see you have a trade-in, do you want to help with your trade in?"
me: "......"
Yea, had to go to a store. I am porting out of shiT-Mobile to Google Fi in a few weeks.
It's amazing just how inefficient large corporations are.
There was never an actual order of 18,000 water cups. The AI did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of the system.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZj6DCWlfc
I wonder if we'll ever use AI to write code in dependently typed languages. Dependent types can check almost anything at compile time; they can check that a function returns only sorted data, they can check that the submit_order function only submits valid orders--again, they can check this at compile time.
So, we could express a variety of high level constraints and let the AI go wild, and as long as the resulting code compiled, we would know it was correct, because the type system confirms it.
If we also include an effect system, then the type system could say things like "this function will return a valid Sudoku puzzle solution, and it will not access the network or filesystem", and then, if it compiles, we know the those conditions will hold at runtime.
Not saying it can’t be done, but I think it’s a bit telling that no such language has ever caught on.
Unit testing can also be used to verify such constraints and is much simpler. It obviously doesn’t guarantee correct behavior like a proof, but if the tests are comprehensive, it can do a great job.
That's the ordering system the AI crashed by trying to order ten thousand piña coladas or whatnot.
Deleted Comment
It's not 1999 anymore, we know this voice shit makes for terrible interfaces. Give it up already.
I wonder how this has affected sales and net profit at their locations using AI in this way.
One of these is active, the other passive.
Dead Comment
When I was at Caltech, institute policy was that if you solved an exam problem, and came up with not just a wrong answer but an absurd answer, you would get negative credit rather than a zero.
The way to get just a zero is to annotate with "I know the answer is absurd, but I cannot find the mistake".
I've also recently had more than one sandwich shop visit where there was a huge line and wait simply because there was only one employee on duty making sandwiches, running the register and taking to go orders on the phone. It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral. Fast food used to be the "starter job" for local teens living at home who weren't going off to college where they could score internships. Now there are far fewer of those jobs and the remaining ones have reduced hours. Plus with fewer positions and less hours to fill employers are less likely to hire teens with zero work experience at all.
>It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral.
I've also noticed a quality drop in almost every aspect of fast food here: slower service, more mistakes, higher prices, shorter hours. It's like the owners are trying to inch more into cutting costs without going over the edge and losing too many customers. Personally, if I want something "familiar" while traveling, I now do take-out from a steakhouse chain. Only costs a small amount more, but accuracy and quality are so much better. At home, fast food is just too expensive to make sense.
Are you sure they were retired? Almost every senior citizen I've spoken to in service jobs has told me that they're hired there because it's the only job that would take them - and they didn't get to see retirement.
The kiosks were just the threat fast food companies used to try to push-back on the proposed law, and when lawmakers called their bluff, there were some deplyments, but not everywhere, and in general fast food employment has gone UP (not down) since then.
"the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed California had approximately 750,000 fast food jobs, roughly 11,000 more than when the higher minimum wage law took effect."
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum...
I'm not seeing the shorter hours you are. Might be unrelated to wages. There was a general decline in fast food sales across the country (not just in CA) because of the crazy corporate price hikes (which consumers pushed back on).
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/10/03/californias-20-fast-food-m...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-10-10/column-the...
It's just the effects of everyone here trying to address this inflation for folks at the lower end of the earning spectrum, but without actually addressing the underlying issue (god forbid we allow multifamily housing next to major transit corridors), which is obviously the massive inflation in housing costs caused by the massive, near-statewide shortage.
Order kiosks, long waits for food, skyrocketing prices all contribute to choosing other options. If you're going to spend $15+ per person and it still takes 30 minutes to order, wait, and eat youre alternative comparable options are greatly expanded and people are chosing to go to independent cafes for better food and experience at the same price point.
Deleted Comment
I’m waiting for the next recession and desperately wanting myself to not be impacted so I can finally expect shit to stay open late again and not be ran by a skeleton crew.
They've also done it in places where minimum wage is still $7.25, so it's not the wages that are the issue.
FWIW the takeaway from the Taco Bell employee:
He didn't like it. He used to take and process all drive-through orders, now he only handles people with problems.