I actively avoid the places that use this. It’s a horrible experience I can choose not to take part in.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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i'd rather go in anyway. order from the app. maybe they can give it to you at drive thru. TB is once a year belly ache
Why would this cause them to rethink anything?
If someone trolls an order of thousands of something, a worker isn't going to just make that thing. I get that retail workers are treated like shit and are paid shit so have zero shits to give. If someone rolls up to the drive through window asking for their thousands of waters or whatever, the people working there are gonna escalate it to a manager or just tell the guy to go pound sand.
Anybody today can go to any drivethrough and ask for whatever and then simply drive away. I'm certain it happens from time to time, even from legitimate orders when someone discovers they leave their wallet at home. If it was a great problem though these businesses simply wouldn't order drive through service, or would require payment before cooking anything.
I'm gonna guess you have never worked in fast food.
Window times are the metric they die by. Generally speaking, they start making your order the SECOND you order it, before you ever leave the ordering screen. Yes, even if the order changes mid order. Yes, they make, and throw away lots of food that is not paid for, forgotten, etc ... TONS of food (literally) is thrown away daily.
As for the water order? I would 1000% start making that order. If the higher ups think the AI is working correct, well then who am I to question it? Nobody who works fast food is paid enough to give a shit.
I worked at a pizza place with a drive through. We sold many items that were non-pizza like wings, subs, salads, burgers, desserts and side items like fries, mozz, etc. My girlfriend's family owned the place, so I was familiar with more than just grunt work and had some inside insight into the business numbers that normal workers do not get.
We would never have fulfilled an 18,000 water cup request.
If someone came by with a catering sized order in the drive through, we would have had them park somewhere and told them a relative estimate of how long it would be. Sure, maybe someone would have started on a couple of things, but we wouldn't be able to fulfill such large orders in the time it took between placing an order and the window. There's only so many workers.
There was obviously plenty of food waste, but that's baked into the cost of the items.
Just shut up and start pouring, we got this. 😂
Because it costed them money, lol. The suits upstairs gave a quote in the article talking about how they will withdraw AI from all 500 locations they were implemented, and it also talks about how McDonalds did the exact same little dance over a year ago.
The mcdonalds thing was because the model they implemented was misinterpreting people and incorrectly placing orders. Yeah, obviously the thing wasn't working right so they pulled that. Sounds just like early personal assistants on phones and other devices, hell my wife still struggles with those. They clearly needed more time developing and testing it with a diverse range of customers from all over. I don't know if they trained it using recordings from real drive throughs from all over, but they should have.
The 18000 water example probably didn't cost anyone anything. Regardless of if it was intentional or not, it wouldn't have been fulfilled as part of an order. They mention it "crashing the system" - whatever that means in this context is impossible to know. Did it take down all of taco bell? Did it cause the LLM to stop responding on JUST this one site? All of them? Did it eventually time out and start working right? it's impossible to know because the details just aren't there and we have no insight as to the system architecture. I always assume there is a method to rely on traditional ordering where a person listening in while the chatbot talks to the person can take over and fix the problem. It's not like there aren't drive through workers still there.
A drive through menu shouldn't have crippling security vulnerabilities that are trivial to reproduce just by speaking near it.
McDonald's thing was because "AI" is a scam.l, and the only way to make money off of it is to shut down your AI selling business after pocketing as much VC as possible (unless your Nvidia of course).
Totally agree. Without details we don't have any idea what actually went wrong.
Even if it's only a receipt for 18,000 waters or it fills up a screen it costs them time and resources.
Every single AI halucinates, always has and always will. It's useless for this.
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I don't understand how taco bell survives in my city when I'm surrounded by dozens of real mexican restaurants and food trucks.
Probably on price.
Taco bell is hella overpriced, but I'm sure that just gives an excuse to the other scumbags to charge even more. I'm always disgusted at the prices food trucks charge vs. the quality of food they shit out.
Useful idiots gonna useful idiot ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It use to be the spot when you had 3AM cravings and only $6 to spend. Now it’s overpriced meat-hose garbage.
Taco bell is one the the few fast food joints that still has decent cheap options.
They have a $7 luxe box ( if you use the app you can customize it.) That actually gives a worthwhile amount of food.
And as far as I can tell it's an all the time deal, not some shitty limited time promotion like mcshit offers trying to get people to come bsck to their overpriced garbage. ($6+ just for fucking "large" french fries)
Not ever since they got rid of the $1 beef burrito.
Taco bell is scamcity just like the rest of them.
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Taco Bell doesn't compete with mexican food, it competes with Jack in the Box and Taco Johns, perhaps anywhere that has a salad bar.
Sure bud.
Would you believe that it is the favorite “Mexican” restaurant in the country?
Taco Bell did win the restaurant wars...
This makes me sad...
My favorite Mexican place is a local place where the staff doesn't speak English well. Their salsa bar is amazing and all the food is super fresh and flavorful.
Taco Bell isn't Mexican food. It's shitty American fast food with a Mexican slant.
Edit: Downvote all you want but Taco Bell is to Mexican food like McDonalds is to a burger house. It's low tier fast food.
The elitism surrounding ground beef, cheese, beans, and tortillas is always amusing.
I bet you also think less or more of people based on how they like their steak.
Nope. But Taco Bell is definitely American style fast food. And it's shit-tier quality. It's delicious, but so is McDonalds and no one argues it's quality food.
But despite some of the viral glitches facing Taco Bell, it says two million orders have been successfully processed using the voice AI since its introduction.
how much you wanna bet they're counting the orders where the drive thru worker had to step in and save the floundering algorithm who could not in fact understand basic speech, or even the purpose of a conversation, as orders "successfully processed" using AI
If money came in the window in exchange for cheap ass beans and tortillas going out the window it’s a win in their books.
Do you really think they were smart enough to annotate their chat logs to track failures?
They didn’t even get basic input validation.
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Not to mention when people change their orders from the basics.
"No onions, I'm allergic."
"Slathering onion juice on everything, got it."
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“Sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me," he said.
That’s what I want from a drive through. To be surprised or let down.
Luckily with widespread use of AI we can implement that everywhere!
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Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.
It's kinda depressing.
FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they're talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using "rethink".
The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of "it's a mess". "We've certainly learned a lot" has to be my favourite.
The fucking taco bell AI likes to ask if I would like anything else, then ask if I want nacho fries. Then, hearing "No", go ahead and add them anyway.
Then it likes watching me drive away, giving the store the finger.
A QA tester walks into a ~~bar~~ Taco Bell...
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