AI in fast food
How Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influencing fast food companies.
Many people when they think of the future imagine automation for everyday activities such as cooking food or packing for school. Though these technologies may seem far off and impossible, many companies are already developing these technologies. Instead of robots in your home cooking breakfast for you, companies are testing out robots that will be taking your order at the drive through. Yes, you read that right! Soon you may be talking to a robot when you go to pick up a quick burger.
How AI works
While there are many ways that artificial intelligence (AI) can be developed to work, the most common and usually best way is through machine learning. Machine learning turns whatever program you are developing into a student. The program will then repeat the process that you want it to do and attempt to complete the task to the best of its ability. It will repeat this task and try to complete this many times and each time if they do this task better or more effectively it will use that strategy or method and make slight changes and repeat. This allows the program to basically learn from its mistakes until it is good enough for whatever you want it to do.
Denver Good Time Burger and Vaylant AI
A restaurant in Denver named Denver Good Time Burger has started using its own AI to control the drive-through. This AI is known as Vaylant and has been very useful during days when workers are unable to come into work. Vaylant is able to take orders at the drive-through and then relay that information to the cooks, making it a functional AI drive-through worker. Due to the new replacement for late drive through workers the company has seen huge success in many key fields. The restaurant saw a 10-25% improvement in customer wait time on average and a 6% increase in total orders. On top of this the restaurant has had a 40% increase in upselling success. Upselling is the practice of offering a customer a better or more expensive option when they are buying something. Think when the person at your favorite burger joint offers you to make it a meal for only $2 more that's upselling. While there are many successes there are still issues with recognizing people who speak softly as well as people with accents. As shown by an article on how voice recognition technology struggles with accents many people find that these apps and devices are unusable for them.
McDonalds arrives in the AI market
Denver Good Time Burger is not the only contender for AI in fast food. McDonalds has recently bought an Israeli AI company for $300 million and has been developing an AI that in 2019 was being tested in 1,000 locations with the plan to implement it in 14,000. This would make both ordering and preparing food faster. It does this by making the connection between customers and chefs quicker and easier as people can use a touch screen instead of having to talk to a cashier that will have to put the information for the order in. This allows the AI to cut down on the amount of steps required to get the order to the cooks. When you drive up, touch screens may suggest or offer you items that it knows that you like based on recent visits. An example that comes to mind is the idea of the AI being able to get to know you and understand what you like to eat as if it were your friend working there and remembering what flavor of shake you order with your “regular”.
A non burger application of AI in food chains
Now this technology is not limited to burger places or even conventional fast food restaurants. Dominos has also been using cameras that can detect if a pizza is not being correctly made or is using the wrong ingredients. This is very important because if someone got something on their pizza that they did not want then that dominos may lose a customer. On top of this Dominos is also using a program letting people order with their voice which is great for people with visual impairments. While these may not seem like the AI robots you think of, they use machine learning and visual and vocal recognition respectively to do their jobs. Two things that are trademarks of Artificially intelligent technology.
As many of these companies start advancing technology for their use it also advances the study of this tech and brings more knowledge about it to the world. Many companies that thought it would be impossible to implement these types of programs to their businesses are now finding ways that AI can better their business. This just goes to show the many useful impacts that AI can have when used effectively and when understood.
Sources https://www.datanami.com/2019/07/30/how-ai-is-revolutionizing-fast-food/
https://medium.com/@danny_54172/how-ai-is-revolutionizing-fast-food-b57b0b792f21
How Voice recognition struggles with accents