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Artificial Intelligence: AI will take orders at McDonald’s in the future

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Artificial intelligence
AI will accept orders at McDonald’s in the future

Orders in the drive-thru at McDonald’s will soon be taken by AI. Photo

© Rick Bowmer/AP/dpa

There is still always an employee on the other end of the line in the car queue at McDonald’s. Soon it could be a chatbot. The US company sees this as the future.

McDonald’s wants to allow AI to take orders in restaurants over time. A test run at more than 100 locations of the fast-food restaurant chain in the USA will be ended after around two years, as the trade publication “Restaurant Business” reported, citing a message to the restaurants. However, the step, which was tested together with the computer company IBM, is not the end, McDonald’s made clear.

After the test experience, the company is convinced “that a solution for voice ordering in the drive-thru will be part of the future of our restaurants,” the US company emphasized in a statement to “Restaurant Business.” Various options are now being examined, and McDonald’s wants to decide on a technical solution by the end of the year.

Software with artificial intelligence is getting better and better at having conversations with people. Speech recognition is particularly useful for ordering in some restaurants, as it should be sufficient to know a manageable selection of words. So-called generative AI – as used in the chatbot ChatGPT, for example – can also formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human.

McDonald’s also entered into a partnership with Google in December to use generative AI, although the details of the deal initially remained unclear. US competitors such as the fast-food chains Wendy’s and Carl’s Jr. are also experimenting with the automated acceptance of spoken orders. It is unclear how quickly such solutions could be applied outside the US, as AI software is usually developed for English first.