McDonalds scraps its AI Order Drive-Through cooperation with IBM

Pretty wild to watch some of the videos that customers have shared, being charged for 200 orders of chicken McNuggets and things like that, when the AI order bot was struggling especially with accents or customers ordering Pepsi Co drinks when they only serve Coca Cola made beverages.

I am quite surprised that this was so bad, on the other hand with the number of order going through these drive-throughs I suspect that by-and-large it was working "okay", just the errors when they happened were so egregious that they had to pull the whole thing.

The other thing that surprises me is that how it could have been so bad actually. The domain is very narrow and when you contrast with the incredible quality of voice transcriptions from online meetings its somewhat unlikely. Of course the environment is different, with traffic and other background noise. At the same time: my partner and I have been recording conversations that we have while going on city walks in Hong Kong and those transcribe amazingly well with OpenAI's Whisper. Ok, IBM is not OpenAI, but that the gap could be that big is a surprise to me.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/17/mcdonalds-to-end-ibm-ai-drive-thru-test.html

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