Taco Bell Introduces Artificial Intelligence for Drive-Thru Orders

Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum! Brands announced on Wednesday that the fast food chain will install AI voice ordering systems in “hundreds” of its US locations by the end of the year.

The company has been rapidly expanding the AI pilot program in recent months. Executives announced in May that the initial 5-restaurant test would be increased to 30 throughout the state of California. According to CNBC , out of the 7,700 or so Taco Bell restaurants operating in the US, more than 100 locations have already installed the voice AI (plus another five locations in Australia).

“With over two years of fine-tuning and testing the drive-thru Voice AI technology, we’re confident in its effectiveness in optimizing operations and enhancing customer satisfaction,” Yum Brands Chief Innovation Officer Lawrence Kim said in a statement.

The technology is touted as being able to speed up service times, boost order accuracy, reduce labor costs and decrease employees’ task load, as well as increase sales via upselling. “Voice AI does not replace any team members,” Kim told CNN. The technology is instead meant to “enhance the team member experience so they can focus on other tasks that are a priority for them.”

Yum Brands is far from the first fast food chain to dabble with replacing humans with digital order takers, thereby freeing up them to perform more meaningful tasks. In 2023, Wendy’s teamed up with Google Cloud to develop and implement Wendy’s FreshAI, a machine learning system designed, “to overcome the challenges traditional AI could not solve in the drive-thru, including understanding casual conversation with customers and handling Wendy’s menu full of customizations and configurations,” per a December 2023 blog post by Wendy’s CTO Matt Spessard. In it, he notes that, “there are more than 200 billion ways to order a Dave’s Double.”

The company initially tested its AI for multiple months at four locations in the company’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The pilot program found that service times, at least at one location, were 22 seconds faster than the average for the local market, and the system took accurate orders between 86 and 99 percent of the time, depending on whether human team members intervened when the AI got stuck.

McDonald’s has also tried to implement voice AI at the drive-thru, but those efforts have been on hold since June . The fast food chain had teamed with IBM to deploy its Automated Order Taker system, a voice AI that was installed in more than 100 McDonald’s locations throughout the US. However, the AI was not popular with customers, who complained that it kept getting orders wrong. Two prominent examples from social media show one customer struggling to not receive nine sweet teas and another shouting “stop” at the screen when mistakenly offered two dozen orders of chicken nuggets .

For such voice AI systems to operate efficiently, they need to be trained on massive datasets that include multiple languages, accents and speech patterns, as well as be able to discern a customer’s speech above the ambient street noise. Kim, explained to CNN that this can be a challenging task, especially when their AI must be trained to understand “quesadilla” as both “kay-sah-dee-ya” and the incorrect “kay-sah-DILL-uh.”

Source: CNN

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