I haven’t heard anything about how Google and Wendy’s are doing with their AI ordering experiment, but according to this here report from the BBC, IBM and McDonald’s have been trying something similar and it’s gone so well that the system is being removed this summer.
It seems that it failed for the very reasons that anyone who has ever used an automated voice assistant would have told you it would. Voice assistants are technology that is simultaneously completely amazing and spectacularly stupid.
The AI order-taker’s mishaps have been documented online.
In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order.
In another, which has 360,000 views, a person claims that her order got confused with one being made by someone else, resulting in nine orders of tea being added to her bill.
Another popular video includes two people laughing while hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets are added to their order, while the New York Post reported another person had bacon added to their ice cream in error.