Last year, Taco Bell made a simple bet that Alexa-like voice assistants could handle the drive-thru window. It didn\u2019t consider whether people could handle dealing with AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company embedded AI in the drive-thru boxes at more than 500 locations across the country and quickly found that it made mistakes, creeped people out, and got very easily manipulated.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re learning a lot, I\u2019m going to be honest with you,\u201d Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told WSJ<\/a>. One of the lessons: People really like messing with AI, like ordering \u201c18,000 cups of water, please.\u201d If you browse Taco Bell Reddit (a surprisingly vibrant community), there are employees and Bell Heads alike lamenting the AI takeover. One employee posted<\/a> that the AI assistant started telling people that the restaurant was out of everything but drinks and sauce packets. A person attempting<\/a> to order a Chalupa Supreme with onions from the AI assistant ended up with three chalupas, and when they tried to replace meat with beans, the AI simply refused.<\/p>\n So things are not going great, but that is not stopping Taco Bell from pushing forward with its AI embrace in one way or another. The fast food staple\u2019s parent company, Yum Brands, announced a partnership<\/a> with Nvidia earlier this year with the goal of improving the technology that powers its AI operations, including the order takers.<\/p>\n Taco Bell certainly isn\u2019t alone in this effort, either. McDonald\u2019s started infusing its operations with AI<\/a> earlier this year, too, with the goal of improving order accuracy. Wendy\u2019s partnered with Google<\/a> to bring an AI chatbot to its drive-thru windows, and specifically started training the model on Wendy\u2019s-specific lingo so it knows that JBC\u201d is short for \u201cjunior bacon cheeseburger.\u201d White Castle is getting in on the action, too, bringing AI to more than 100 of its drive-thrus<\/a> with the help of speech recognition company SoundHound.<\/p>\n A quick scan suggests these efforts are going about as well as the Taco Bell experiment. McDonald\u2019s reportedly ditched some of its AI interactions with customers after it kept messing up orders<\/a>. People have also taken to social media to complain about having to deal with the Wendy\u2019s AI chatbot, finding it to be inaccurate<\/a> and creepy<\/a>.<\/p>\n