• Manalith@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Whenever I need a new profile picture for my TTRPG character, absolutely. Anything else? No thanks.

  • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Still order like grandpa. I go in and want to talk to a human and order. I hate those gross ass touchscreens. I am probably a minority especially in my age group and working in tech

    • StitchIsABitch@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Always wondered why anyone would rather talk to a person than take their time, have a nice overview of the menu, and pay in advance. I guess they are gross though.

      • CodingCarpenter@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The only time I would rather not talk to a person is if the accent causes a language barrier. Otherwise 9 times out of 10 a person is going to understand what you want better especially if it’s a customization issue

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The only time I would rather not talk to a person is if the accent causes a language barrier.

          “Gobble gobble goo?”

          “Uhhhh…I’m sorry?”

          “Gobble…gobble…goo?”

          “…what?”

          “GOBBLE GOBBLE GOO!!!”

          “I have no idea what you mean by that…”

          Guy behind you in line: “c’mon man!!! Pay attention! He’s saying CAN I HELP YOU?”

          “Really? Those phonetic sounds were supposed to be in any way similar to the thing you said? It’s not even close…”

          “English is probably his second language. How well do you speak THEIR language?”

          “Which language do you speak?”

          “Yjxrjk#@■♡○{rjbzwk!”

          “I’m done.”

        • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          At least in my experience I have more customization issues when taking to people rather than using an app or going through a kiosk. The only time it’s the other way around is when they don’t include an option I want on the digital version but that’s becoming less and less common for me at least. The number of times I’ve had orders just missing customization things I asked for but they didn’t hear or forgot to enter is much higher when I go through the drive through or go in person then when I do it through something digital.

      • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Because I’m at a fast food place in the first place because my time is important and I don’t want to waste it ordering.

        That and the guy taking orders does it 1000x a day and i can easily order that way instead of me navigating ten different menus just to order a simple meal for my family.

        I’m OK with my old man status at this point. Tech is good when it improves things for the consumer. The kiosks seem to just improve the company bottom line IMO.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I am a touch screen enjoyer. At least in theory. I like having time to browse, look at pictures, easy access to customization options and most importantly no feeling of pressure. I am not spending a cashier’s time and potentially blocking someone behind me (at least there is usually less of a line for the self-ordering).

      However there are negatives for sure. My biggest annoyance is that these devices are often annoyingly slow and unresponsive. They just display a tiny bit of text and images, they should switch between screens at 60fps, not 2s per click. Also if I know what I want it is often faster to tell the cashier and let them enter the order (on their more expert-optimized and less laggy keypad).

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Also, explicit confirmation of your customizations and of your order. You can double check yourself to make sure it’s all correct before submitting the order while the distracted and overworked employee at the counter could hit the wrong button or skip a customization and you often wouldn’t know until you receive the wrong item. Then you have to create more work for the workers to get your order remade.

      • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is why I tend to just use the mobile apps for places to order. Not laggy and gives the benefits you mentioned of using a touch screen kiosk. A lot of them you don’t even need an account to use the app which is nice if that’s something that bothers you.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          The apps are super slow though. Like I don’t need a 5 second animation of bouncing fries every time I do anything. Dunkin is another offender.

        • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, I like this style but don’t want their apps installed on my phone. A few places have mobile sites which is excellent, I know what access it has and it is shut down completely when I close the tab.

          • kescusay@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            But what if they want to notify you about great deals and coupons? DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT GREAT DEALS AND COUPONS?!?

            • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I just don’t give notification permissions to most apps unless I actually care about notifications from it.

      • amelia@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        They just display a tiny bit of text and images, they should switch between screens at 60fps, not 2s per click.

        I think this is intentional. They want you to take time looking at the pictures so you might think “you know what, actually I’d like some of those fries as well” by making it hard to just quickly select what you want and leave.

        I wouldn’t even be surprised if there’s a psychological effect where you feel like ordering more makes this tedious ordering process more worthy. I mean why go through 2 minutes of clicking and waiting just for one stupid cheeseburger.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        I find this a bit odd as you make it seem as if ordering is a complicated process that takes some thought and planning. The whole draw of McDonalds is that you get the exact same food wherever you may be and their options are fairly limited. Ham/cheeseburger, chicken burger, fish sandwich, or nuggets is pretty much your array of options.

        I personally dislike the ordering screens as they make the process way to drawn out. Let me just pick a #1, the size, and the drink and be done with it in 3 taps. Last time I used one, it wanted me to basically build my own meal as if I was ordering Dominoes online and building my own pizza.

        • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          As I said if you know what you want the cashier is usually faster and easier. However I don’t eat at any single fast food place very often. So even if I know sort of what I want I don’t remember exactly what toppings, flavours and sizes are available. If I was ordering I would probably just pick whatever common order I would expect can work, but I appreciate that I can see a list of options and do a bit of browsing.

        • spongebue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          their options are fairly limited. Ham/cheeseburger, chicken burger, fish sandwich, or nuggets is pretty much your array of options

          You must not have been to a McDonald’s in a while. Do you want that chicken sandwich grilled or crispy? Spicy? Are we talking the basic value sammich you can wolf down before you leave the parking lot, or the bigger one that comes in a cardboard box? The one with bacon and ranch, or one of the others? Did you want a combo meal? Lettuce is stupid filler on a sandwich, do you want to skip that?

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Supposedly AI is going to take all the jobs and yet it still can’t do this task which it seems perfect for. Sure, eventually AI will get good enough to do it in the future, but there is just way too much hype given the reality of the current situation. This is a job that fast food workers are already required to do in addition to other duties, so it’s not like it’s labor saving from the company’s perspective either.

    • ours@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is no certainty that LLMs can overcome the current limitations they are stumbling on.

      I think developments in AI will come but there is no guarantee they will. They seem to be suffering from the Pareto Principle just like self-driving car ML models and this despite huge investments.

      • jas0n@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        100% this. The base algorithms used in LLMs have been around for at least 15 years. What we have now is only slightly different than it was then. The latest advancement was training a model on stupid amounts of scraped data off the Internet. And it took all that data to make something that gave you half decent results. There isn’t much juice left to squeeze here, but so many people are assuming exponential growth and “just wait until the AI trains other AI.”

        It’s really like 10% new tech and 90% hype/marketing. The worst is that it’s got so many people fooled you hear many of these dumb takes from respectable journalists interviewing “tech” journalists. It’s just perpetuating the hype. Now your boss/manager is buying in =]

        • ours@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Breakthroughs are so interesting and the reason predicting the future of tech is so hard. Text embedding and “Internet scale” training are likely the things that allowed this AI boom and the amazing initial results.

          I think many people see AI (and other tech) moving linearly from the current point forward but any software developer knows this is rarely the case. And no one can predict the next breakthrough.

          It doesn’t help the hype and confusion around ML/LLM/AGI. And because on the surface LLMs seem intelligent people misunderstand their capabilities (much like politicians). They certainly have fantastic uses just as they are now but a lot of people are overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view) of our new “AI overlords”.

          Personally, LLMs are absolutely amazing at supporting me in my professional writing. I don’t let it do my work but it helps me play around to find a better way to express some things like if I had a sparing writing partner.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    speaking as someone who worked a drive thru window during morning rush: LET THE FUCKING AI WORK THE DRIVE THRU

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Why would they in the first place? What’s wrong with a touchscreen menu to take an order?

    Then, of course, I’m not sure such places fundamentally even need human personnel other than maintenance techs. Standard ingredients, prepackaged I think, standard hardware to cook, standard everything. It can just be a huge burger-selling machine with no human in sight.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Touchscreen? That’s old, we can’t use that in our marketing, even BK has those. We need something new, fuckin do I care if it works???

        • suction@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Those would stop working because local scoundrels would stick their chewing gums in them

            • suction@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Those could work if it wasn’t for the local perverts blocking them 24/7 because twiddling them feels a bit like twiddling a robot’s nipples

              • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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                1 year ago

                Never seen that. One can make them less like nipples and more like a depressable square area on a wall.

    • LordCrom@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I personally HATE those places where you walk inside and you need to use the stupid touchscreen. I’ve asked someone to take my order, they say no. So I get in the car and go to the drive through where you still get a person taking your order.

        • figjam@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          Not the OP but for me it takes like 4 times longer to use the tuch screen. Find the button for what i want. Do you want to super-sized? Do you want fries with that? How are you paying today? Blah blah blah whereas with the counter its me saying one sentence and them pushing 2 buttons.

          • bc93@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That makes sense to me - if you had the choice between using a touch screen to place an order immediately or waiting in line behind 4 other people though, would you use the touchscreen then? Again, just curious, I’m not trying to make out that you’re ordering McDonalds wrong ;P

            • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Ooof not sure why you got downvoted.

              I’m starting to think people who hate ordering from a touchscreen really see talking to a cashier as fulfilling social needs.

            • LordCrom@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              If there are 4 people in line for a cashier, take away the cashier and you still have 4 people in line waiting for the kiosk… And it will take longer because ordering from the kiosk is a slow process.

          • suction@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Maybe stand a foot further apart from the screen? That way you’ll be able to see the button better.

            What you hate about it are the constant upsell shenanigans, not the touchscreen per se. I dislike those, too, but I reckon the human staff are also trying to sell more than you want?

        • suction@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          He’s looking to chat up some young ladies before he has to go back home to the old ball’n’chain…

    • tankplanker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lots of their drive thrus use a person to take the order, and at a busy drive thru this becomes a dedicated person or persons just to take orders. If they can flip it to AI then they could open more lanes and reduce staff. Problem is that a skilled person is going to be better than AI over a shitty audio system, look at how Alexa and Siri struggle even when they have an optimized reception setup than the crappy setup you have at a drive thru with the person sitting inside their car, with music on and so on.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Maybe voice interfaces are simply a fundamentally flawed idea. If one can extend a hand to take the package with the food, they can also push a few buttons. If those buttons are with hercons or such, they’ll even last longer than consumer-grade touchscreens.

        Of course it’s easier when a human takes the order. But then if the cost of N screens with physical buttons is equal to that, one can make their order, say, N/2 times slower without any hurry and, well, the throughput should be higher still.

        For drive thrus - that’d be M lanes with such terminals and a bit slower than M lanes with people. So - depends on how the cost of asphalt and space and people and terminals work economically.

        What’s definitely idiotic is to think one can replace a human with an “AI” without losing in efficiency. But then again, maybe it’s worth it.

        • tankplanker@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          While I like the ideas with screens, and fixed buttons even more so, they haven’t gone with them despite the tech being available for a considerable time. I do wonder if its mostly down to how people use them rather than a limitation of the tech itself. Watch how many people nearly swipe or even do scrape exit parking machines, even simple parking meters stop working, people struggle to use the ones inside, then add in weather damage/proofing and vandalism and I would guess thats a big part of it. As its often a closed queue system any problem becomes a major issue almost instantly.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if they could actually get worse than the drive-thru order stations I’ve experienced. I work in audio, so I know what is technically possible. To talk to and trying to convey an order through a system that sounds worse than my grandmas’ rotary dial telephone during a thunderstorm is a real pain for me.

  • ramsgrl909@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m getting old. But I want to order through a person. Not a touchscreen and not AI.

    I feel like society is slowly removing humans from our everyday interactions and I don’t like it.

    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      I prefer a touchscreen in general. Although I realize that different companies have better or worse systems. I read complaints about self checkout in the USA and scratch my head since in Holland self checkout is lovely.

      Trying to use AI is a dumpster fire though.

      • Frokke@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        Got stopped a few times after leaving the self checkout. Very rudely. Extremely rudely. The excuse every time was that I did it too fast and they suspected theft. Refuse to use self checkout. They can shove it.

        Touch screens for ordering are ok. Except when you have tech illiterate people in front of you.

    • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t mind letting a “robot” do that kind of work. In a perfect world that would mean less work. In the real world it means they van fire some people and make even more money. But then again, i would never eat at McDonald’s anyway, so it’s hard to boycott

    • Oachkatzlschwoaf@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I love ordering through touch screens. No mis hearing and everything goes much quicker.

      The added value of that human interaction for me personally is 0.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        The kinds of places that get touchscreen kiosks often have teenagers taking your order who are not paid or trained enough to give any shits about any of it. The touchscreen saves both of you from doing the worst part of the whole process.

        • ramsgrl909@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Adding onions to a mcchicken is impossible through a touchscreen. Can easily be done if I talked to a person

    • Mabel [She/Fae/Its]@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I like the touch screen ordering systems, but thats probably just because im autistic and find human interaction tough :p Im glad its an option, but it shouldnt be the only one for accessibility reasons.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I like touchscreens because I can spend more time getting my order right without wasting the cashier’s time.

        I don’t want to talk to a cashier and have them explain the difference between a bacon sandwich supreme, and a bacon burger deluxe.

        I don’t want to confuse them by asking for extra veggies and watch them put it on the side.

        I don’t want to argue that I asked for two packs of ketchup and they gave me BBQ.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s fine when what you want is on the menu. But as soon as you have a question or need something a little bit off menu (hold the tomatoes, does that have nuts in it? I’m allergic, this food came out cold can I get another?) the glorified vending machine doesn’t work.

        • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The good machines (uncertain about McDonald’s) let’s you customize everything. Want three pickles? So it. Half mayo? Sure. No top bun? Live your life!b And it gives you ingredient listings.

          And whose to say the minwage cashier even knows what’s in the food? Not at all a insult, but in my area, many cashiers have English as their third/fourth language.

  • greenskye@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m just really good with talking to robots, but the AI drivethru voice at my local McDonald’s is way, way, way more accurate than basically all of the employees they used to have running it before. A few times it’s been down for whatever reason and an actual human takes my order and I remember how shit they are at their jobs when they get my order wrong yet again, or can’t hear me, or talk with gum in their mouths or whatever.

  • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why not just have a touchscreen menu then? You already need large screens so people can confirm the AI recorded their order correctly and this will skip the need of a person manning the drive through menu. You could even include options to “hold the pickle”, etc.

      • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This would also be nice. Usually, I only order fast food if I can place a call first (Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Pizza, etc). Grubhub fees are ridiculous or and apps are always taking your data.

  • Alpha71@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hunh. And here I thought they couldn’t get any worse than when they had call centers taking orders from the drive through…

    • Manalith@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s excessive now, but once it works, I’d much rather subscribe to drivethru AI than pay an acceptable living wage to some human. /s