adjl posted...
Yeah, that'd be weird. Voice activation/control has its place in situations where directly manipulating controls is difficult or inconvenient, but having a robot take your order verbally instead of through a digital menu would be more for novelty's sake than any actual benefit.
They already want to add AI to drive-up windows, which would mostly involve voice-recognition and ordering. The technology basically already exists - automated phone operators can recognize certain key words and process accordingly. It wouldn't be that difficult to fully automate the process.
Basically, the endgame there is you drive up to a window, get an automated "Hello, can I take your order?" message (which they already do now), and then the AI would listen for certain key words, post what it thinks your order is on the screen in front of you, and ask "Is this correct?" And if it is, it'll just tell you to pull forward.
Maybe keep one human on hand to jump in if the person asks for a human cashier to take their order, or to troubleshoot if there's a problem, but for the most part you could offload the majority of orders to AI (in the same way that they've automated indoor ordering via computer screen and mostly eliminated the counter-person, but they
can
still have a human take your money if you're paying cash, or if you need to troubleshoot a problem).