Artificial intelligence is taking away jobs: Wendy’s and Google are testing a voice chatbot that will take orders

Fast food chain Wendy’s is automating its express customer service with the help of a voice chatbot with artificial intelligence. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The service will work on the basis of natural language software developed by Google and will be able to understand the many ways in which customers will make orders.

The project is planned to be officially launched in June at the company’s restaurant in Columbus (Ohio, USA). Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor explained that the goal of the innovation is to simplify the ordering process and prevent long queues.

The chatbot will be very “conversational”, so customers will not know that they are not talking to an employee, but to an artificial intelligence. Wendy’s custom language model will include unique terms, phrases and abbreviations that customers are accustomed to using when ordering.

At the same time, the service should solve not only “language problems”, but also cope with other problems.

“You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for AI, but it’s actually one of the hardest,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, the company’s cloud-computing division.

Other problems include extraneous noises in the car. The software needs to distinguish these sounds and focus on the person placing the order and the language they are using. Also, the program should be ready for quick changes if the client makes them halfway through. Among other things, the service will be able to offer customers larger sizes, ice cream or daily specials.

Wendy’s does not disclose the cost of the project, but talks about successful test runs of the chatbot.

“It’s at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it’s probably on average better,” the company added.

Let us remind you that generative AI technologies actively push not only the potential development of companies, but also force people to change professions. For example, in response to the appearance of ChatGPT, some freelancers, copywriters and content managers quit their jobs and retrain as AI Prompt Engineers.