by josephwegner
4 subcomments
- I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
- When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
by HarHarVeryFunny
6 subcomments
- Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing.
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
- I don't understand the appeal of drive throughs?s?
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
- In a way, we need these "pioneers" who operate at scale to serve the dual goals of giving lessons learned to future developers of AI tech, and proving to us that the technology is just not ready to supplant this kind of work.
by lordnacho
4 subcomments
- Why order when you arrive at the place? Just have people talk to their phones, and make sure the order has some sanity checks and orders something similar to what they can order online? There's less noise talking to your phone, and you can do it without being in line.
- I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end.
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
- Recent and related:
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065391 - Aug 2025 (186 comments)
by wodenokoto
2 subcomments
- I feel like the article skips over all the interesting stuff. How did user out weird the AI? In what ways did they troll it?
by michaelbuckbee
1 subcomments
- This feels like a very knee-jerk reaction to this and not what's actually the case: a new system with weird bugs.
It just seems very similar to the sort of articles that came out when online ordering or touchscreen ordering first appeared.
Like one of the big knocks on the Taco Bell AI ordering was that it let people ask for a 1000 waters on their order, which yeah is dumb, but it's the kind of thing the humans actually making the food are going to catch.
by electric_muse
0 subcomment
- What’s wild is that drive-thrus are one of the few places where humans actually expect and even forgive a little chaos. You get muffled voices, wrong items, and confusion, and nobody is shocked. Dropping AI into that environment is less about tech maturity and more about customer psychology.
by diamond559
0 subcomment
- Yeah I used this and it couldn't get my order right after 5mins we gave up, the "future" everyone...
- The AI answering systems I've had to speak to are brutally bad as far as accuracy goes. Basically I'm always called back to validate the info.
- I'm gonna be that guy - was this article written by AI? Where were the actual clever/funny/bizarre anecdotes that the (IRL) Darwin awards are known for?
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
- Anyone involved in fast food automation should see this movie about AMFare in 1956.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY
by nextworddev
1 subcomments
- They clearly hired the wrong consulting firm / AI agent stsrtup
- This is just a glimpse of the future. The real future is when your self driving car talks to the Taco Bell AI and gets your Taco.
- The best thing about this is learning that aidarwinawards.org exists.
- I guess the company it is a Voice AI company went from 0-10M ARR in weeks and boasted about it in linkedin.
- Have they heard about staging roll-outs and A/B testing or Multi-Armed Bandit testing?
by joshdavham
3 subcomments
- So AI will replace software engineers but not fast food workers because that work is too complex for AI?
by micromacrofoot
0 subcomment
- > deliberately trolling the AI with absurd orders that would make even experienced drive-thru workers question their life choices
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!
by kissgyorgy
0 subcomment
- One can only hope this would bankrupt companies doing this and other companies would learn not to push AI into every fucking thing.
by Drunkfoowl
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by bigbacaloa
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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