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McDonalds removes AI drive-throughs after order errors
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Wasn’t this just voice recognition for orders? We’ve been doing this for years without it being called AI, but I guess now the marketing people are in charge
A computer: does anything.
Tech journalists: is this AI?
Voice recognition is “AI“*, it even uses the same technical architecture as the most popular applications of AI - Artificial neural networks.
* - depending on the definition of course.
Well, given that we're calling pretty much anything AI these days, it probably fits.
But I honestly don't consider static models to be "AI," I only consider it "AI" if it actively adjusts the model as it operates. Everything else is some specific field, like NLP, ML, etc. If it's not "learning," it's just a statistical model that gets updated periodically.
New stuff gets called AI until it is useful, then we call it something else.
You know what they call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.
Tim Minchin reference?
It's more than voice recognition, since it must also parse a wide variety of sentence structure into a discreet order, as well as answer questions.
Honestly, it doesn't need to be that complex:
There's probably a dozen or so more, but it really shouldn't need to understand natural language, it can just work off keywords.
You can do that kind of imposed structure if it's an internal tool used by employees. But if the public is using it, it has better be able to parse whatever the consumer is saying. Somebody will say "I want a burger and a coke, but hold the mustard. And add some fries. No make it two of each." And it won't fit your predefined syntax.
Idk, you could probably just show the grammar on the screen, and also allow manual entry (if insider) or fallback to a human.
That way you'd get errors (sorry, I didn't understand that) instead of wrong orders with a pretty high degree of confidence. As long as there's a fallback, it should be fine.
Anyway, that's my take. I'm probably wrong though since I don't deal with retail customers.