[ExI] roboburgers to go

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Alejandro Dubrovsky <alito at organicrobot.com
> wrote:

> On 26/09/13 06:53, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net
> >
> > The front could be semi-automated much faster than the kitchen. I'm
> > actually surprised that they haven't turned the cash registers around on
> > the front desk in McDonalds they way they have at Home Depot, Walmart
> > and some supermarkets around here.
> >
> >
> One of my local McDonalds tried it for a while, but the experiment
> didn't last long and the machines got taken out. The interface seems
> surprisingly hard to get right. Too many products, too many ingredients
> that people can and do individually take out or add. Everyone skipped
> the machines and long-queued at the human-operated registers (I did too,
> even though I am a strictly machine-only queuer at the supermarket). I
> suspect that they'll have to go with either a short-list of classic
> options only, or very good speech recognition.
>

While that may be entirely true, and I don't doubt it, I still think that
is easier than automating the kitchen.

Ray Kurzweil's consistently poorest prediction is the "when speech
recognition will take off" which I attribute to his bias as part owner of
the largest and most successful speech recognition program/company on the
planet. (wishful thinking has struck down better thinkers than Kurzweil.)

I own Dragon, but I rarely use it myself, despite being a pretty big fan.
The bottom line is that people just don't want to talk to a machine, or at
least to one that doesn't talk back. I think if you got the feedback
correct, i.e. there is a video recording of a pretty young (possibly
topless) lady doing every possible combination of asking for your order,
there will be little chance of getting it right enough for most people to
use.

-Kelly
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