Taco Bell's AI Drive-Thru Plan Gets Caught Up On Trolls and Glitches 127
Taco Bell's rollout of AI-powered drive-thru assistants has run into problems, with glitches and trolls gaming the system by making absurd orders like thousands of water cups. It's so bad that the company is reconsidering where and how to deploy the tech, admitting it may not work well in "super busy" restaurants. "We're learning a lot, I'm going to be honest with you," Dane Mathews, Taco Bell's chief digital and technology officer, told the WSJ. "I think like everybody, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me." The Verge reports: Since announcing plans to put AI in the drive-thru last year, Taco Bell has deployed the tech in over 500 locations across the US, according to the WSJ. Other fast-food chains are experimenting with AI, too, including McDonald's, Wendy's, and White Castle. Mathews tells the outlet that while the company still plans on pushing ahead with AI voice technology and evaluating the data, he's discovered that using AI exclusively in certain situations, like a drive-thru for "super busy restaurants with long lines," might not be such a great idea after all.
Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:4, Insightful)
So sometimes it lets him down and sometimes he's surprised at the new and ridiculous ways it lets him down.
No one could have seen this coming without way more common sense than a CTO.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. The funny part is:
(with) "trolls gaming the system"
How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
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Indeed. The funny part is:
(with) "trolls gaming the system"
How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
Given Taco Bell's clientele, this could be a description of physical characteristics rather than behaviour.
Serious answer, I think we all know the MBAs and techbros thought it would just work and they lack the ingenuity of one drunk redneck jonesing for some nachos.
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Indeed. The funny part is:
(with) "trolls gaming the system"
How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
Because you can't compete with the efficiency with which the world creates idiots and assholes.
A software tester walks into a bar... (Score:5, Funny)
How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
A software tester walks into a bar, runs into a bar, crawls into a bar, dances into a bar, orders a beer, 2 beers, 0 beers, 99999 beers, a lizard in a beer glass, -1 beers, qwerty beers. Testing complete.
A user walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar goes up in flames.
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That's the quote I was looking for... :-)
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Good joke, but only two Funny for this story? So much potential...
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Jeeesh impatient much, give it time ;-)
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One of the problems with Slashdot is the lack of time. Stories only last a day without regard to the potential of the discussion or significance of the story.
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To be fair it's hard to think of everything people will do when you open something to the general public. I worked in game QA after high school for a few years and one of the challenges was trying to think of everything the general public might do when playing a game. Taco Bell may have even done some testing on pranks customers might do, they just didn't think of these specific pranks. In the end it's kind of impossible to predict everything people will do once you release something like this out into the
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Simple: They bought this. And the AI scammers have no interest into giving their customers realistic cost and performance data.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like having somebody take a poke at connecting a system that is supposed to be pretty OK-ish at natural language processing and text-to-speech to an ordering system is particularly unreasonable; at the scale they are operating probably more unreasonable not to; but "well, it's live in 500 locations and we've learned that a technology synonymous with prompt injections and a lack of common sense so profound it's almost a category error to suggest it could have any isn't super robust..." makes you sound unbelievably dumb and risk insensitive.
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Well... considering that they're trying to use these AI assistants to cut down on head count and fire their co-workers, I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn that their friends are looking for way to exploit the system. If anything, Taco Bell's technology team should be expecting that.
Mod up insightful (Score:2)
and more should do it!
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is the language barrier often gets in the way. How many times have you had a problem where someone who does not speak English is the one you are talking with when you are trying to order your food? You ask for something BASIC, not trying to play mind games with them or anything, and they don't understand what you want to order. That is the situation that makes these AI order systems a good idea. Know the customer base, and the employees, and if you can eliminate the language barrier with technology, that's a positive thing.
Unless having an employee who has their entire job involve translating or dealing with the language barrier, the AI won't replace too many jobs in this case.
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In 45 years of living and eating at cheap restaurants, I've never had this problem when going to one in the United States. Or any other country where English was the native language. Why? Because they may hire non-english speakers in the back for kitchens, dishwasher, etc they make sure cashiers and waiters speak english, and they talk to the people in back. So it's an utter non-issue. It may have niche usecases in places with large international tourist crowds, but even then you generally need to tell
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In 45 years of living and eating at cheap restaurants, I've never had this problem when going to one in the United States. Or any other country where English was the native language. Why? Because they may hire non-english speakers in the back for kitchens, dishwasher, etc they make sure cashiers and waiters speak english, and they talk to the people in back.
You've never ordered fast food through a drive-thru in California, apparently. The number of times I've had to repeat things half a dozen times is quite high, and although some of that is the sh*tty intercom system they use, having a language barrier makes the garbled, muffled sound into a much bigger problem than it would be if both ends of the conversation were native speakers of the same language. It doesn't prevent ordering, but it does slow things down quite a bit. Even if all the AI does is turn wh
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I can't say I've ever had that problem. When it comes to quantity numbers between 1 and 10 and names of foods, these are things that people pick up on quickly - and often the name of the food is similar in their own language anyway. Or the English name is at least recognizable to a native speaker of the other language.
Customizing or special instructions can be hard, but it's also really hard for an LLM too.
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People still use BASIC today? :P
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I am far from being a conservative, and liberals tend to prefer conservatives far move than progressives, so I don't fit into that category. I've definitely had issues where the person taking orders does NOT speak enough English to be able to take a fairly simple order without it being unpleasant. A lot depends on where you are for if it's a problem or not.
Re: Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:2)
Wow.
conservatives never stop making up scenarios in their brains to be mad at.
at my local hole n the wall mexican place they dont speak english but if i say "carnitas torta" they take my order fine.
In other words, when you order in Spanish from a Spanish-speaking waiter, they take your order fine?!?!
That's amazing, really - speaking in a foreign language to a foreign language-speaking worker, how did you come up with that?
Now, explain to me how that disproves issues speaking English to non English-speaking workers?
Wow.
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Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's PC-speak"? What are you talking about? It is merely MBA-babble when caught with one's pants down.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean ... (Score:2)
Re:I mean ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their stocking system might try to reorder their entire complement of cups. An automated QA system might ding somebody for not filling the order. Use your imagination -- there are lots of ways this could go wrong as they increase automation.
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You are thinking they have a system that "does everything". If the AI system is there primarily to handle the order process, then anything like this wouldn't do more than just take the orders in whatever language the customer speaks, and for the food prep, it's being done by people who don't necessarily speak the same language.
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It sure as hell looks stupid coming through the computer, especially if the poor taco flipper filling the order has to manually refuse every cup
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They just have to hit the minus key on the order cart 17,999 times. Or delete the entire row and re-add. Oh but because of an overflow condition, they might actually have to hit the + key.
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... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
Unless the store manager happens to also be a Tik Tok influencer who wants to turn filling 18000 water cups into some kind of "viral" stunt.
8 hours and a $2,000 water bill later, they'll realize the 27,000 views wasn't nearly enough to stop off a well-justified firing.
Unless the district manager happens to also be a..
(Try not to forgot the attention-whoring world we live in.)
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8 hours and a $2,000 water bill later
Damn, do you live in the middle of the Sahara Desert or something? If the cups are 16 oz each, 18,000 cups would be 2250 gallons. I think that would cost me something like $60.
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You see it a lot in grocery stores, and big box/department store setups where there are either certain POS operations that lock up and require manager approval(seems most common if they need to void a mis-scan over a certain value or multiple mis-scans or customer-decides-they-don't-want-it changes of order; or if s
Training and craftsmanship (Score:3)
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... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
In that case, the system responded properly by passing the customer to a human; which was the whole point of the video.
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... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
I'm not sure if it's still the case, but rather hilariously McDonald's app would actually allow you to order a hamburger and remove literally everything through the customization options. Then of course, you'd be charged for and receive an empty box.
The way it's supposed to work is that a human absolutely does have the ability to cancel absurd order requests like those, but sometimes they just don't care. In the case of thousands of water cups though, that's likely to be filled the same way my local Chic
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You mean as long as you define "95%" of the anomalous conditions ahead of time. Should take someone like you, what, about an afternoon with break for tea?
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You mean as long as you define "95%" of the anomalous conditions ahead of time. Should take someone like you, what, about an afternoon with break for tea?
yea, maybe a couple days of basic stats. It's a small finite menu of items and they probably have an large database of historical orders that can be categorized. not really a big data issue.
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The issue with your logic is that 5 percent of the customers get an awful customer experience. Sure Taco Bell saves some money on staffing but 5% of frustrated customers might not come back.
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Not at all. This is no different than those times an employee cannot hear or understand a person and asks them to pull up to the window. Is that also an "awful customer experience"? Because I can tell you right now, humans are not right 100% of the time taking drive-thru orders.
Further, you're not even considering the responsiveness. AI begins taking the order immediately, where employees often have a several second delay before they can get to you, and that's assuming they don't flat-out tell you to wait
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Bojangles (Score:5, Interesting)
Bojangles (primarily a southern chain in VA, NC, SC and GA) have been using AI at the drive throughs and it works great. I don't know how immune it is to trolling, because I'm not an ass, but it works great for normal people.
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It honestly wouldn't surprise me if their "AI" was a mechanical turk.
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It probably wouldn't surprise the MBAs either, but they don't care as long as it's cheaper than employees.
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Isn't proclaiming one's self to be a non-ass kind of an assy thing to do?
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Imagine engineers of our age ever ever ever assuming someone shouldn't be an ass to something we've made.
It was practically the seeds of our cohort's eventual careers.
I'll tell you what the "asses" grew up to be far more dependable and trustworthy than the good boys who never broke anything, got good grades, and went into tech because someone said it was a good career. I hope the asses of today tear through all this half assed shoddy workmanship on the horizon.
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A business that uses AI to eliminate this language barrier
They aren't using it to eliminate the language barrier, or even trying to. They only claim they're trying to as a marketing afterthought.
They're using it to eliminate employees. That is the only criteria.
And to go into the details: Employees are either the #1 or #2 expense for them, probably #1, given the margins on raw materials in that industry. That means that the AI can actually degrade the quality of service and cost them a lot of lost business and still be more profitable than the employees. If your e
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They're using it to eliminate employees.
There's not a single restaurant in the world where a fast food employee taking your order at a drive through isn't also working on a second task in parallel. This isn't eliminating any employees. If anything it's likely to free up an employee to focus on the other thing they are doing and reduce the number of times your order gets fucked up due to multitasking.
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Indeed. somebody is manning the drive-thru during all business hours, regardless of how often they switch off. Eliminate those work hours, you eliminate that payroll.
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There is no slack, there are tasks done with hands and tasks down with your mouth. Each employee only has a limited number of both. You can't eliminate the mouth job, fire an employee and tell another to grow two additional hands.
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Less work means the need for less employees which saves money. It's the reason companies are pushing for AI use here, it's to save money. Otherwise, what would be the point? We could already order drive through before AI.
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There is no less need for employees. The amount of labouring remains the same whether an employee is chatting into a mic or not.
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They're using it to eliminate employees.
There's not a single restaurant in the world where a fast food employee taking your order at a drive through isn't also working on a second task in parallel.
Maybe in East Bumfuck Egypt. I could take you to half a dozen places with a mile of where I'm sitting where the drive-thru is a full time job.
And if humans are doing less work, they are costing less. Period. To believe otherwise is to disconnect from reality.
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They're using it to eliminate employees.
There's not a single restaurant in the world where a fast food employee taking your order at a drive through isn't also working on a second task in parallel.
That really is super rare. In most fast food restaurants I've seen, even in dense urban areas, the person running the drive-through register is also running one of the counter registers or fetching food for the people who are.
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I could take you to half a dozen places with a mile of where I'm sitting where the drive-thru is a full time job.
You may think so, it just means you've never actually been in the back of the restaurant.
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The system works decently, and if an order isn't correct, that's due to the people working to fill the order, not the AI order system.
That's a pretty bold unsubstantiated opinion there.
Nice (Score:2)
donald_glover_good.gif
Not AI's fault, just crappy developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't train the AI model to have sane limits for free items, didn't write business logic to limit what the AI model could send to the ordering system. No different than that team that recently posted about losing its whole production database when their AI agent panicked during a deployment and dropped the production database. Not the fault of AI. Just the fault of unprofessional people who mistake a barely working proof of concept that is only ready for internal stakeholder demos for something ready to be unleashed on the public.
(WRT the database story, this is... why you use something like Liquibase, Flyway, Rails transitions, etc. not some dumbass crap like "Claude, uses these credentials to go automagically update my database based on the entity objects in my code base.")
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Would be more sane to just not have free items.
Even one penny is better than free.
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You really believe people are going to go to a drive thru that charges them per napkin, per straw, per bag? Not that the MBAs wouldn't love to if they could.
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It's Taco Bell.
If people are willing to eat that shit, they probably don't care about being charged for napkins.
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You bet your life savings on a franchise over that. I'll pass.
Re: Not AI's fault, just crappy developers (Score:2)
No free items on menu, define threshold for human intervention, say $60-75? Once an order gets to a certain size, AI should hand it off. AI is probably great for situations where folks say things like "the #3 combo, large please"
Re:Not AI's fault, just crappy developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The human workers have been told how to limit those items and the software should also be told how to limit those items.
I suspect that, by and large, they have not, in fact, been told how to limit those items, because they don't need to be told. If a request (like 100 cups) seems unreasonable, they'll either call a manager, or just say no and get screamed at until they call a manager. But they don't need any actual training on what is unreasonable.
AIs cannot be taught common sense. Every AI in existence so far has proven it, again and again.
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I suspect that, by and large, they have not, in fact, been told how to limit those items
So you haven't worked in fast food, huh? They absolutely have policies on such things.
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Nice attempt to ignore the point: AIs cannot be taught common sense. They generally can't be relied on follow
But you won't ever address that, will you?
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But you won't ever address that, will you?
I address it and other failings constantly in discussions about LLMs.
Don't make personal attacks while making ignorant statements to people whose content you're not familiar with.
just make it go into beavis and butthead mode when (Score:3)
just make it go into beavis and butthead mode when people start fucking with it.
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Idiot proofing (Score:4, Insightful)
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-- Albert Einstein
Where is the buyer going to put all of that water? (Score:2)
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Re: Where is the buyer going to put all of that wa (Score:2)
There's going to be a problem now, now later
I want to talk to a person! (Score:3)
Oh, and stop skimping on the cheese you cheap jerks!
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Every Taco Bell I've been in recently will, in fact, have a person take your order. If you're patient enough for them to notice you. Fastest way seems to be to stand at the kiosk on the counter and act confused and irritated. But overall, I do agree.
(McDonald's, on the hand, has apparently listened to the feedback on the many ways their kiosks suck, and they're actually not too bad now. You have all the same options as the cashier for each item, and it is actually faster about 99% of the time because there
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Franchises tend to vary a lot by owner. McDonald's exerts a lot of control over practices in each location, but most other chains don't.
I agree that Taco Bell's kiosk system isn't all that well designed.
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And do you realize that you basically just said that the cashiers are too dumb to work a register that is essentially a smaller kiosk, so it is better for everyone to use the kiosks despite the general population including not only every cashier, but also the people too dumb to be cashiers?
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When asked to use the Kiosk, I clearly state out loud "The recent study I read shows that nearly 100% of restaurant screens contain fecal matter. I'm not touching that!" and everyone in the place freezes up for a moment. One place even handed me a pair of rubber gloves to place the order.
Seriously, just take my order. Sheesh.
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I don't want to stand there doing a cashier's job
I wonder, do you apply that logic everywhere and completely refuse to do any online transactions? You're not doing a cashier's job, the cashier's job by nature is a redundant extra step, one that may introduce error into the process causing your order to get fucked up.
But that said I do support shops having one cashier for you and others like you. We need options, and the options should be diverse because you and I have different desires. I don't want to stand in line because it's not financially viable to
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I like the kiosks, at least at McDonalds. Because I can just walk up, select what I want and add the customization I want to the order then pay by card right the
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Why should I be doing a cashier's job for free when I'm already tired from doing my own job? It isn't more accurate - most of the mistakes happen after the order is placed and they don't have robots making the food (yet).
I was at Wendy's yesterday and had to go in (my window stopped rolling down). I always order my burgers "no cheese, ketchup only". It took MUCH longer to go through all the options and remove things than it would have taken t
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But real people sometimes "forget" to present you with all the up sells... I mean value add options... or whatever they're masking it as this quarter.
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Maybe if we all just go back to standing at the counter and then complain when they say to use a kiosk, they'll stop this. I'm just not that interested in doing a cashier's job when I'm on the way home from doing my own.
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And I'm 100% sure they would never ever use that information for any other purpose. /s
The right outcome is....? (Score:2)
Surely that should trigger the firing of the chief digital and technology officer?
He's Saving Face for his Superior (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with this, and no I have 0 knowledge of the situation, but that never stopped anyone in the internet before-- he's calling it an "oh shucks" situation to save the face of the superior that pushed hard on this (and that he yes-man'd into reality).
"Who could've known" prevents ego bruising the little tyrant who is flawless above you and thus gets your head off the chopping block to pay for their mistakes.
Or not.
Courage (Score:2)
It takes Apple level courage to fuck up ordering at your large restaurant chain. Dane Mathews is a risk taker, but apparently not very good at judging risk.
AI is the Walgreen's TV screen cooler doors (Score:2)
Like, people are spending money on this bullshit, and it makes no sense.
Taco Bell (Score:2)
Our local Taco Bell isn't using this, so I can't really speak on accuracy there, but Bojangles is using an AI order taker and while I haven't intentionally tried to trip it up, I will say that as a customer just ordering, its been very, very accurate. Probably MORE accurate than a human order taker for me as it doesn't get complacent or ignore things if its tired and what not.
A lot of times though even at other places I've started ordering through the app, even if I'm already in the drive thru line, I'll p
It's horrible... (Score:2)
If I pull up to a Taco Bell and it has one of these, I just drive off.