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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Exactly why I cannot stand using the kiosks to order food at a fast-food restaurant. They take what used to be a five-second process to verbally state an order, and turn it into a multi-minute agony of taps, reading, canceling suggested upsells, etc. before finally getting to completion.

I guess the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore. And then they wonder why their year-over-year sales are declining.

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Our nearest McDonalds has a Siri-like virtual assistant thing taking orders at the drive-through. They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order. If you order anything with a number in the name, it may give you that many of it instead of one of it. I don't know how well it does at modifying mistakes but I'd bet the answer is "it can't, it just tells you to pull forward and talk to a real person".

It sucks.

And yeah, the damn order-kiosks manage to take saying the words "large black coffee" and turn it into a two-minute process.

Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation, they're just making customers do more work than paid workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's still happening, and is less efficient, the businesses just aren't having to pay for it. That's not automation.

> They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order.

Voice assistants are still stuck at that 90% point of "good enough to be impressive, bad enough to not work in practice". The selling point of free-form voice recognition is that you don't have to learn the language of the computer. I still believe this is bullshit. You have to do it anyway, but there are no references for it. Hell, even the developers don't know what the "language of the computer" is, because it's defined as "whatever the ML model doesn't choke on".

It would be much better if we stuck to structured natural-language queries with controlled vocabulary[0]. People would quickly pick up on it, and even if it sounded a bit artificial (not much worse than interacting with voice assistants sounds anyway), it would at least work.

> Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation, they're just making customers do more work than paid workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's still happening, and is less efficient, the businesses just aren't having to pay for it. That's not automation.

The older I get the more I see it, that it's literally most software in a nutshell. Starting with Office suite - yes, the word processors, calendars and spreadsheets - that killed dedicated secretarial jobs and distributed the work they did evenly across everyone.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary

> and turn it into a multi-minute (...) suggested upsells

This is how the restaurant chain deploying those kiosks sees it.

> the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore

This is self-correcting over time, as more and more places adopt such systems. It's just another supplier-driven market. Fast-food restaurant meals are not really commodities. If I'm in a mood for, say, a McDonald's cheeseburger, there is no other vendor I can get it from[0], so I'm going to suffer through the kiosk experience. It's calibrated to be just about bearable enough that I'm not going to skip the meal because of it.

Everything seems to become more and more like this, in every market - burgers, fridges, cars, phones, webapps, everything. As annoying and abusive as possible without making it a deal-breaker, offered on a supplier-driven market, so the non-annoying, non-abusive alternatives don't exist.

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[0] - Yes, Burger King next door may have similar cheeseburgers, but they feel and taste different enough to be non-substitutable. But even if, guess what, they also have those stupid kiosks.

Market for lemons, or the old saying about bad money always pushes out the good money.

For another example see touch-screen automotive UIs, universally hated by everyone except the bean counters, so we're stuck with them forever.

Also WRT the BK next door, its probably 5 minutes away by car or 30 minutes away on foot, which explains the corporate push toward "Walkable cities" and so forth. At my last onsite office job, there was a deli on the first floor and we were essentially captive customers; in theory there were plenty of places to walk within a half hour walk, but in practice its raining and 40 degrees so we were forced to shop at the company store, so to speak.

The trade off isn't in terms of the order, it's that you get back the time waiting in line behind several very slow people.

You can also order in the app from the comfort of your home, car, bus, sidewalk, thereby skipping the "standing and huffing at the kiosk" scene entirely.

When I was in Israel almost every fast-food resturant had a kiosk like that, and they were all super easy to use and responsive. This might partially be an implementation problem.

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