A chain of fast food restaurants is testing artificial intelligence to take customers’ orders, without many noticing that they are not talking to a human being.
We already knew that some jobs were in jeopardy after the arrival of AI in a general way to the public. OpenAI itself already published at the time a list with 11 jobs that would disappear that AIs would destroy. At the time we also talked about 20 professions that were going to be threatened, but we did not imagine that something like this would come so quickly.
The news has jumped, how could it be otherwise, in the United States. According to what was published in TechSpotin the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain there is already a restaurant that takes orders from customers through an AIwithout many of the customers even being aware that they are talking to a machine.
Something no one saw coming
The software engineers who have worked on the development of this AI have achieved fit a language model to keywords and phrases specific to the restaurant menu. All the jargon that has to do with products being sold on the chain has been integrated into the AI so that it can respond to user requests efficiently.
The AI has been installed in the chain’s drive-thru service, so it has also been programmed to deal with some environmental deficiencies typical of this type of service: background noise, people talking inside the vehicles, exhaust pipe noises, music playing at full volume… and, of course, people who change their orders when one is already in progress.
Apparently, the chatbot was created with the idea of reduce the queues that formed in the car service. The company was concerned that customers might go elsewhere. They also say that the first tests they have conducted are very promising, and they expect the general deployment to take place during the month of June.
