A major change is coming to Taco Bell drive-thrus
CNN
There may soon be one fewer person standing between you and your Cheesy Gordita Crunch.
There may soon be one fewer person standing between you and your Cheesy Gordita Crunch. Taco Bell is set to expand the use of artificial intelligence voice technology in its drive-thrus to hundreds of US locations by the end of this year, parent company Yum! Brands said Wednesday. The move means that when users pull up to place their order at a Taco Bell, there’s a good chance they will be talking to a computer, rather than a human employee, on the other end. Taco Bell isn’t the only fast-food chain to test having customers talk to AI in its drive-thrus in an effort to free up employees to spend more time on other tasks and boost sales. But Taco Bell’s expansion comes after a prominent rival had trouble trying to use similar technology. McDonald’s said last month it was pulling the plug on the AI ordering technology that it was testing at more than 100 US drive-thrus, after customers complained about the system getting their orders wrong. Viral videos showed customers ending up with absurd orders as a result of the McDonald’s AI drive-thru technology, like the woman who didn’t really want nine sweet teas or the girl shouting “stop” at the screen as it tallies up more than two dozen orders of chicken nuggets. That AI struggled to perform well in a drive-thru setting isn’t totally surprising. The technology needs to be trained on huge sets of voice samples to correctly understand the full range of human accents and speech patterns, and noisy environments can throw off AI speech recognition tools. And we all know the frustrating experience of being on the other end of a poorly functioning computer assistant, desperately wishing we could just talk to a human.
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