This is why McDonalds literally spends tens of millions of dollars per quarter giving away free food to attempt to get more people to just use the app.
Their plan longterm is exactly this - have a robot box with a window that only accepts orders through your phone and removes all humans from the process.
You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially, but also there is a large portion of the population that only use technology when necessary.
We build a heuristic model from scratch. We used BART for some NLP bits and Azure speech to text for the basic mic -> raw text. My memory is very muddy on this bit as I didn’t work on the algo portion of the project, I was working on the UX workflows and interaction / conversational workflow design and validation.
Fun fact, McDonalds menu is a graph database that tracks every single ingredient as purchasable entity. You can order damn near any combination of elements and they will sell it to you - want 32 pickles and the bottom piece of a bun with a chocolate chip cookie on top? No problem.
And every promotional item and name ever put on sale is persisted in the menu forever.
> You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially
It is not just older folks. It is also anyone mildly or more security/privacy aware. App's offer far more opportunities for spying/tracking and as well "advertising" (push messages), none of which I am interested in giving the business.
In my case, if an app is required, I move on to the next business where an app is not required.
> You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially
Yep, but not because I'm older but because:
1. I do not want McDonald's (or anyone else) to link my orders together. It's none of their business.
2. App fatigue. I don't even eat at McDs, but I don't want an app for every grocery chain i buy from either.
3. Any app, even if not "AI" based, is going to fail in more annoying ways than a human.
Their plan longterm is exactly this - have a robot box with a window that only accepts orders through your phone and removes all humans from the process.
You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially, but also there is a large portion of the population that only use technology when necessary.
We build a heuristic model from scratch. We used BART for some NLP bits and Azure speech to text for the basic mic -> raw text. My memory is very muddy on this bit as I didn’t work on the algo portion of the project, I was working on the UX workflows and interaction / conversational workflow design and validation.
Fun fact, McDonalds menu is a graph database that tracks every single ingredient as purchasable entity. You can order damn near any combination of elements and they will sell it to you - want 32 pickles and the bottom piece of a bun with a chocolate chip cookie on top? No problem.
And every promotional item and name ever put on sale is persisted in the menu forever.