I can answer that. Because I'm sick of installing a hundred apps for every single company, setting up accounts, verification, so I can spend 10$, and never use it again.

And, when you are traveling, and just taking the highway exit for a quick order, what, now I have to stop, park, download an app then order.

Or do you mean, like mount Ipads in kiosk mode? I think that gets back to the expense and weather.

I think it gets better over time. It is like with cars having no knobs or no physical buttons anymore. We have to figure it out. We have big screens in cars now, why is the menu not even integrated, when you get close to your McDrive? Why not allowing each shop a virtual space in your car, when you drive nearby?

And by the way, we all wanted employees to have a better pay. It is just pure survival mode now by mcd. Since paying humans is expensive now, one has to find ways to make them expendable even more, so that the company remains profitable for the franchise people and keeping the product price low.

(And after all, was McD not a real estate company?)

I hate the self-serve kiosks inside the places... I'm relatively tall, and trying to use them is often an exercise in frustration. Especially when there's no mechanism to adjust the height or angle.

This is why McDonalds literally spends tens of millions of dollars per quarter giving away free food to attempt to get more people to just use the app.

Their plan longterm is exactly this - have a robot box with a window that only accepts orders through your phone and removes all humans from the process.

You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially, but also there is a large portion of the population that only use technology when necessary.

We build a heuristic model from scratch. We used BART for some NLP bits and Azure speech to text for the basic mic -> raw text. My memory is very muddy on this bit as I didn’t work on the algo portion of the project, I was working on the UX workflows and interaction / conversational workflow design and validation.

Fun fact, McDonalds menu is a graph database that tracks every single ingredient as purchasable entity. You can order damn near any combination of elements and they will sell it to you - want 32 pickles and the bottom piece of a bun with a chocolate chip cookie on top? No problem.

And every promotional item and name ever put on sale is persisted in the menu forever.

> You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially

It is not just older folks. It is also anyone mildly or more security/privacy aware. App's offer far more opportunities for spying/tracking and as well "advertising" (push messages), none of which I am interested in giving the business.

In my case, if an app is required, I move on to the next business where an app is not required.

> You might be surprised how many people absolutely hate using apps, and do not want to interact with a business through a mobile phone. Older folks especially

Yep, but not because I'm older but because:

1. I do not want McDonald's (or anyone else) to link my orders together. It's none of their business.

2. App fatigue. I don't even eat at McDs, but I don't want an app for every grocery chain i buy from either.

3. Any app, even if not "AI" based, is going to fail in more annoying ways than a human.