If you watch the actual video[0], you'll see that it's not that dramatic. Man says "18 thousand water cups", the AI appears to transfer the customer to an employee, who immediately picks up and takes over.
There was never an actual order of 18,000 water cups. The AI did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of the system.
I don't think that's what happened at all. It sounds like somebody was monitoring the 'AI' and then cut off the software right as it was about to respond. You can hear it start to say something, that sounds a whole lot like 'okay', before the mic swaps over to a person.
If users can always fail out the AI, why have the AI? Users will learn and socialize how to obtain a human. The human did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of their time.
If you're asking seriously... Because, as the AI continues to improve, more and more users will choose not to fail out intentionally, reducing the required level of human staffing for a certain number of customers / orders. It's just like today - there are some users who will keeping "hitting 0" to get to a human, but many others who won't.
As a human who always hits 0 or bails out, I think this is yet to be proven. There are even products to help with this. If legislation is required to always provide a human for customer service, that can be done.
People use the phone tree not because they want to, but because they have limited alternatives. Companies deploy them for line goes up ("how can we provide as little value as possible for as much profit as possible without the customer leaving"), not for the benefit of the customer.
Yes - and the point is, if everyone availed themselves of the alternative (e.g., escaping the phone tree), as previous post implied, then "line wouldn't go up" and companies would stop.
That would be the customer of the phone tree software...
Of course it exists for their benefit. But, if all customers escaped from it, then it would be pointless and companies would stop - why spend money on something the doesn't reduce costs? So, since companies do, in fact, implement and retain phone trees, they are undoubtedly benefitting from doing so. And, to loop back to the start of this branch, if AI-driven "phone trees" do a better job than traditional ones (and there's no reason to suspect that they won't, over time), then fewer customers would opt out and it would be more beneficial to companies.
Because I don't want to touch the same screen that 1000 other people have touched since it was last cleaned and because I dont want to learn how to navigate a new menu every time I stop at a new fast food place, I just want my chicken chalupa without needing to navigate menus. If you've ever stayed in line at the order kiosk at mcdonalds you'll quickly realize how slow people are to place an order, now imagine that in the drive thru
> I don't want to touch the same screen that 1000 other people have touched since it was last cleaned
How do you handle doors in public spaces? People have been touching door handles to enter fast food restaurants for decades and we've been fine.
> you'll quickly realize how slow people are
This, I think, is the real reason we won't see screens at drive-throughs. Screens can work in-store because you can have many screens to compensate for slow people. To apply the same for cars you'd either need the screen move with the car as it moves through the line, which would likely mean placing the order on your phone, or you'd need significant infra to create many stalls where cars can place orders. For the latter, Sonic is well positioned for this with their drive-in stalls but most other fast food restaurants don't have the physical space for that.
> How do you handle doors in public spaces? People have been touching door handles to enter fast food restaurants for decades and we've been fine.
I go to the wc and wash my hands before touching my food, can't do that if I'm ordering in the drive thru and I dont always have hand sanitizer around and don't really like using it either
McDonald’s and Taco Bell actually have a great, working solution to this. You order in their app, and they provide a code you give to the drive thru attendant (to pick and place the order into the queue). The customer places their order on their own mobile device at their own pace, but you still have a human for people who don’t use the app or don't have a mobile device. They provide free food and other incentives when placing your order with the app, which I think is fine from a behavioral economics and price discrimination perspective. No AI required.
Cars? If you put the touch screen close enough to where people can reach it, it's close enough to be hit with the car. It'd need to be on a moving arm or something, and seeing the car stop. (In-n-Out just sends a person out with a tablet when the line gets longer...)
Our CEO was boasting about new speech to text technology recently. They said something that I found extremely objectionable:
"I can speak a lot faster than I can type."
The fact that I found it objectionable doesn't mean that he said something untrue. For him and most others, it probably is true.
But for me, a keyboard warrior by trade for 30 years who has high functioning autism and crowded teeth and actually doesn't like talking, I can type WAY faster than I can speak aloud.
In spoken conversation, I am usually a man of few words. But sit me in front of a text prompt and I will TL;DR the fuck of you with a 5 page essay on a topic you probably don't really care about.
My point is that everyone has their own preferred method of communication, and most people like talking just to hear the sound of their own voices. A lot of people say they prefer interacting with a human at restaurants - I avoid going to restaurants because I don't like interacting with people and will DoorDash to my home instead. To asocial introverted keyboard warriors, it's sometimes difficult for us to relate to the baseline human experience.
Why have an automated phone system if someone can get a human operator by pressing 0? Because the automated system works for typical interactions, and reduces the labor load of the human to only handling edge cases.
There was never an actual order of 18,000 water cups. The AI did exactly what it was supposed to do in order to prevent malicious abuse of the system.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZj6DCWlfc