Taco Bell boldly deployed voice AI-powered ordering systems across more than 500 drive-through locations, convinced that artificial intelligence could finally s
Verified
Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird.”
Reported by: Isabelle Bousquette, Technology Reporter for The Wall Street Journal - August 28, 2025.
Taco Bell boldly deployed voice AI-powered ordering systems across more than 500 drive-through locations, convinced that artificial intelligence could finally solve humanity's greatest challenge: efficiently ordering tacos. The company's confidence was so spectacular that they rolled out the technology at massive scale, apparently believing that voice AI had conquered human speech patterns, regional accents, and the creative chaos that occurs when hungry humans interact with fast food menus.
The Wall Street Journal revealed that customers were not quite as enthusiastic about their robotic taco consultant as Taco Bell had hoped. The AI systems faced a perfect storm of customer complaints, system glitches, and what might charitably be described as “creative user interaction”—including customers deliberately trolling the AI with absurd orders that would make even experienced drive-thru workers question their life choices.
Faced with mounting evidence that artificial intelligence and natural stupidity don't mix well at the drive-thru window, Taco Bell began “reassessing” their AI deployment. The company announced they were evaluating where AI is most effective and considering human intervention during peak periods—corporate speak for “our robots can't handle the breakfast rush and we're not sure why we thought they could.”
This incident represents the collision of three unstoppable forces: corporate AI evangelism, the infinite creativity of hungry customers, and the fundamental reality that ordering food involves more chaos variables than training a large language model to play chess. Customers reported “glitches and delays”, while others were “intent on trolling the [AI] system” with absurd orders, proving that humans can out-weird artificial intelligence even when they're just trying to get a burrito.
Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta: spectacular overconfidence in AI capabilities, deployment at massive scale without adequate testing, and a public admission that their cutting-edge technology was defeated by the simple human desire to customise taco orders. When The Wall Street Journal reports that “the most transformative technology in over a century may have finally found its limit: ordering tacos”, you've achieved a special kind of technological hubris that deserves recognition. Even more remarkably, despite this spectacular AI fail, Taco Bell is reportedly still moving forward with voice AI, which they say remains a critical part of the product road map—proving that true AI confidence means never letting reality interfere with your technological roadmap.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal: Taco Bell Rethinks Future of Voice AI at the Drive-Through
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Comments
By josephwegner 2025-09-0722:464 reply I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
By potato3732842 2025-09-089:581 reply It's the speed limit problem.
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
By bboygravity 2025-09-0812:172 reply So the solution is more AI: to replace c-suit.
By sedawk 2025-09-0822:30 It most certainly would be a very interesting experiment... Alas, the real powers-be would never let such an experiment off the ground... EVER!
By NonHyloMorph 2025-09-0815:30 Let's make sure we're living in a somewhat egalitarian society and our systems are aligned with that, shall we?
By Quarrelsome 2025-09-089:062 reply you've hit the nail on the head here. AI rollout has this hilarious consequence where "lower" departments have for a long time insultated the c-suite against their worst excesses and worst mistakes. Now that barrier is slowly crumbling due to AI-first, giving the c-suite an incredibly rare opportunity to discover how bad some of its ideas are in practice and there's less opportunity to blame those outcomes on others.
By ethbr1 2025-09-0822:37 I've always thought of this as the reality grease problem.
We need rules. Yet the infinite variety of reality creates infinite situations in which the rules are counterproductive.
Previously: the ground folks had a brain and bent/ignored certain rules in the interest of getting their job done.
The principle peril of creating a more end-to-end automated, lights-out business is that there is no longer a brain to grease the interface between c-level and reality.
And c-level is never going to admit their own mistakes.
Ergo, you're going to get a lot of command-heavy companies that plow themselves into the ground over the next 10-20 years, because the low-level people they're going to fire were performing an essential function.
(Note: the easiest escape, inasmuch as I can see one, in radically data-driven management, with frequent random shifts between analogous but independent metrics)
By Ruphin 2025-09-0814:42 I am pretty certain that if you are in an org where c-suite shifts reasons for negative results to external sources, they will find a way to do the same in the age of AI.
By Jordan-117 2025-09-0723:571 reply That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.
By mapt 2025-09-0811:21 Big box retail here.
One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".
That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.
By mildlyhostileux 2025-09-0815:231 reply I'm optimistic that the ease of enforcing rules like this and better customer data (maybe via the apps) will lead to a better format. The annoyance grows from the rules causing us to be prompted to do or respond to things we don't want or need. When the taco bell guy asks if I want to add sour cream for the third time, I am getting pretty annoyed. I don't like sour cream, period. But every time they hit me with "would you like to double the chicken", even if I wasn't a yes upon driving to the window, I cave when they ask and both parties are probably happier for it. Management isn't totally wrong here because there are upsells that all of us would take when presented at the right time. It's a bit like ad targeting. Its just happening in realtime at the window.
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
By daotoad 2025-09-092:47 I wish I was optimistic that data and compliant robots will be used to make things better for customers.
I think it's far more likely that they will, at best, be used to do whatever horrible and unpleasant things that temporarily juice sales numbers. Across our economy we'll see this play out in every customer service interaction. And a wave of perniciously persistent upselling attempts will wash over us all.
After a while, we won't stop noticing that the simple process of buying a soda requires saying no to 15 different requests to subscribe to a service, put our credit card on file, sign up for notifications, and consider buying cookies, a burger, and some fries. But our lives will be worse for it.
seems they took Dude, Where's My Car as an inspiration?
By KoolKat23 2025-09-0815:04 I'm very curious as to whether it'd listen or it's design even let's it listen to you if you tell it to stop upselling at the onset.
By fouc 2025-09-084:46 I would hope you can actually skip that automatically by ignoring the follow-up and immediately driving off to the next stage.
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
I’ve always wondered if that battery spiel paid off. Do you have any stats? I never once was at Radio Shack and was like “yeah let me get some of your batteries” when they asked. Maybe I’m a fringe case.
By conductr 2025-09-081:48 Their battery business was strong even towards the end though, the "even if you're only buying batteries" part of the GP post subtly telling
By onetokeoverthe 2025-09-086:46 [dead]
By redwall_hp 2025-09-085:291 reply I've had minimal contact with drive-thrus in the past decade, because ordering ahead online is superior in every way.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
By SOLAR_FIELDS 2025-09-085:311 reply Works when you actually have that option. Usually the only time I ever go to fast food places are late at night when everything else is closed. Most open-late fast food joints in smaller cities and towns will only have the drive through open, not the restaurant area.
By justinrubek 2025-09-0812:50 In no way does this refute the usefulness of ordering online relative to voice. Maybe those food places don't have online ordering, but that isn't a fundamental limitation.
I've used the Tacbo Bel AI drive-thru and came away with the same thought. I kind of groaned at first but it was very accurate, even when making adjustments.
By dr-detroit 2025-09-0816:34 [dead]
By PapaPalpatine 2025-09-0722:524 reply I have never heard someone describe drive-thrus as a “famously bad experience.”
By BobbyTables2 2025-09-0723:419 reply There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
I've always been puzzled that Starbucks drive through is a thing, and even has long queues. It's coffee, do people really drive there just to get a cup? I understand if it's along the highway but otherwise. You pay the premium of the brand without getting to see or enjoy the facilities. Just my feeling as european, maybe just a cultural thing.
By midnightclubbed 2025-09-085:44 Some people stop every day on the way in to work rather than make coffee at home in the morning. They’re often ordering some caffeine concoction rather than drip coffee. I have known people with $100+ per month Starbucks habits.
They make the dessert-coffee drinks that some folks like. Those can be kind of a pain to clean up after, with all the frothed milk and sugar…
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
By midnightclubbed 2025-09-085:381 reply Yeah it’s this, Starbucks isn’t a coffee place; it’s a caffeinated drink place. Their brewed coffee (outside of their higher end tasting room stores) is deliberately undrinkable to push you to their espresso drinks or their sugary concoctions.
By fxtentacle 2025-09-087:07 That’s spot on! I really like the chocolate milk at Starbucks. And sometimes I will get one with the optional shot of coffee added.
By maxsilver 2025-09-0812:41 (re: drive-thru) You're going to be waiting aorund in a really long queue for Starbucks regardless.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
By rightbyte 2025-09-0813:32 Getting a coffee, small snack or other beverage might be the only sane thing to order to a car though.
By dr-detroit 2025-09-0816:36 [dead]
Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order, made me think that maybe the drive thru isn't that great of an idea during rush hours. The staff needs to handle orders in a very specific sequence, to get the cars moving, meaning that they'll need to priorities drive thru orders. Wolt/DoorDash impose the same problem to an extend. I've notice that orders from in restaurant customers is frequently seems to be de-prioritized to get the drive thru line moving or to get the deliveries out.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
---
It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
By tomjakubowski 2025-09-0818:56 I observed the same thing around the time online ordering became more popular. It used to be that at a lunch spot, cashiers or phone operators could restrict the order flow a bit to keep the kitchen from getting overwhelmed with orders. DoorDash et al. have no interest in that, they only want to take as many orders as possible, as quickly as possible; they have an incentive to obfuscate the real wait time from customers.
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
By Atotalnoob 2025-09-0815:16 There is a Starbucks in downtown Chicago that is always empty, but has a 30 minute wait due to online orders.
It is incredibly frustrating cause you have to wait while they fulfill online orders.
They should have priority queues to ensure that certain order types take priority
By jonathanlydall 2025-09-0812:44 I don't know how true this is, but I recall hearing many years ago that McDonalds operating model is to anticipate orders during heavy periods as opposed to making on items only on demand.
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
By jonbiggums22 2025-09-0814:42 McDonald's around here have designated wait spaces with numbers. I've had them direct me out of line and an employee then brings the bag out to me when it is ready. So they do seem to have solved that problem.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-0814:551 reply > Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order
Oh, mine lets you order online and then pick up in the drive through.
By mrweasel 2025-09-0814:59 Mine does that as well, but it's like a five minute walk or two minutes on a bike, and I'd feel silly walking through the drive thru.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
By boogieknite 2025-09-086:071 reply if youve ever been inside to listen to these kinds of orders these people WILL find a way to still take 3-4 minutes to order from an AI. if an AI can get those numbers down i want copies of those transcripts so i can learn how to do this myself
By bell-cot 2025-09-0812:59 Sadly true.
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
I got trapped in a Burger King drive thru for half an hour. Car parked in front of me, cars stuck behind me, concrete barrier on the right keeping me from pulling away.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
At least my bank won the chargeback.
By jonbiggums22 2025-09-0815:19 What is the deal with trapping you in anyway?
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-09-084:04 Most Wendy's without a kiosk have the cashier's chronically ignoring customers at the counter as online orders queue up from the receipt printer. I'm on a personal boycott for this shit tier service.
People are "famously bad" at correctly valuing their time. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone spend $x of their time making a business case to purchase something that costs $y, where x > y.
By lbreakjai 2025-09-0817:24 Thats only if you can get $x for every minute of your time. On paper, it'd be cheaper for me to hire someone to empty and fill my dishwasher, but in reality the time I spend doing the dishes isn't time I would be spending earning money.
By tstrimple 2025-09-087:43 Honestly sometimes sitting in my car away from everyone for an extra 20 minutes without actually having to interact with anyone is exactly what I am looking for. No other demands on my attention. While waiting for my over priced sugar coffee concoction I can just relax for a bit.
By bell-cot 2025-09-0812:48 Some similar experiences here, and not just at Starbucks. Counting heads, I've too-often noticed that the busy-looking employees outnumber the customers, and still the service is dead slow.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
By MangoToupe 2025-09-087:011 reply I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of getting diabetes. Curiously, these same people often turn their nose up at equally-sugary soda. You'd think people would just learn to make this at home with a moka pot and a milk skimmer that costs less than what they paid for a single drink...
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
By grues-dinner 2025-09-0811:36 > inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.
They’re usually a lot slower than going inside and people have been cracking jokes about the quality of the speakers since the 80s.
By PapaPalpatine 2025-09-0722:572 reply Yeah... that's just not the experience with drive-thrus in Central Ohio.
Maybe they’re less busy there but everywhere I went in California it was faster to park and walk inside if there was anyone in line ahead of you, which was almost always the case. The problem is that you’re limited by the slowest order ahead of you but the same place usually has multiple registers inside and the people who are waiting for pickup don’t block you from ordering. (Head of line blocking in real life)
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
By Larrikin 2025-09-083:15 When I worked at McDonald's in high school, the drive thru times were tracked (for manager shift bonuses) and the in store orders were not. Drive thru was always prioritized over in store if there was a possible wait on anything.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
By cardiffspaceman 2025-09-0818:26 Starbucks allows you to order from home, and drive to the store. The ones I go to usually have my Americano waiting for me when I get there.
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
By JKCalhoun 2025-09-0812:50 Regardless, I'm not gong to eat out of my lap in a car. Or sit there needlessly running the car engine while waiting to move 10 feet forward.
I suppose the best thing about drive-thru is that there is plenty of parking now at these "restaurants" when I run in to eat.
By Spooky23 2025-09-083:54 It’s worse now because fast food isn’t fast, and you end up committed with online ordering. You need to online order or pay a big premium, then you discover the drive through line is a trip to narnia only when you arrive.
By micromacrofoot 2025-09-080:441 reply people rather sit in their car for 15 minutes than walk for 1 to save 10
Or because their kid or dog is in the car. Or because they have difficulty walking. Or because they just want to decompress and scroll their phone or listen to the news for 10 minutes. Or they hate crowds. Or they are immune compromised and don't want to be mingling with a bunch of people around a counter. Or they have social anxiety. Or they have a cold and just don't feel like getting out of their car. Or they are expecting a call from the baby sitter. Or they are having a fight with their spouse which they don't want to export into the public.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
By micromacrofoot 2025-09-082:041 reply people are allowed to make broad generalizations without listing caveats for every exception, this kind of pedantry is exhausting
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
By midnightclubbed 2025-09-085:531 reply I think your parent made a perfectly good point. Going into the store is a whole lot less pleasant than staying in my car and waiting a couple extra minutes in an environment I enjoy.
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
By JKCalhoun 2025-09-0812:53 Don't disagree with your generalization of the interiors of fast food restaurants, but I can't say I prefer the interior of my car either.
By micromacrofoot 2025-09-080:431 reply oh central ohio, well in that case it's definitely everyone else that is wrong
By PapaPalpatine 2025-09-082:301 reply Or maybe you and everyone else is of a certain age that y'all need to get your hearing checked more frequently.
By micromacrofoot 2025-09-0815:311 reply right again! logically we all need hearing aids specifically for drive-thrus
By PapaPalpatine 2025-09-0815:45 Do I win a prize?!
By MangoToupe 2025-09-087:101 reply Interesting. I've found going inside to be much slower because the cashiers are so busy with the drive thru. I guess this probably varies from brand to brand, if not store to store.
Definitely "Dunkin" (as it's called now) can fuck right off. (And don't let this old man get started on store employees that allow a caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them.)
By devilbunny 2025-09-0819:23 > caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them
Oh. That triggers one horrific memory.
I was buying some bread at a nice local bakery. I wanted a few items. While three or four of us were in line, someone called in. The in-store employee pulled the last loaf of one variety off the shelf to reserve it for them.
When I complained, the manager told me that that was the correct move and they supported the decision. I suggested that polling the people who were actually in the store - actual, not just potential customers - before giving away the last loaf is probably wiser.
The poor quality of drive through communication is a common joke because it’s such a universal experience.
Hasn’t been the case since the 80s. Speaker tech works really well these days.
Speakers work well if they're set up well, maintained well and used correctly. Most drive thrus sound like shit because none of those are true.
By dawnerd 2025-09-087:29 So the ai here isn’t what’s improving anything, it’s the companies forcing themselves to upgrade.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
By JKCalhoun 2025-09-0812:55 Never mind background noise of traffic, etc. Location of the drive-thru, time of day, is important as well.
By loloquwowndueo 2025-09-080:18 I disagree. First, there’s a 40-year chasm between the 80s and “these days”. Next - anecdata? I have found horrible drive thru audio systems in the past decade, let alone in the last millennium.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
By collingreen 2025-09-083:48 This is a crazy claim. I still routinely get bad speakers or mics, 40 years after your claimed cutoff. Where do you live? I expect you must have really great drive throughs pretty much everywhere near you in order to make this bold of a refutation of the comment above.
Do you not know anyone who has been through an American drive-thru?
By PapaPalpatine 2025-09-0722:58 I drive through them at least once a week. Ordering is not hard. Talking the order is a lot harder -- I've done that too.
When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
By anywhichway 2025-09-0723:503 reply I feel like we watched different videos.. Seemed like the AI (or other monitoring system) recognized a problem with the 18000 cups of water order and quickly transitioned to a real human. That instance looked pretty production ready to me.
By jameslk 2025-09-080:02 I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
By Dunedan 2025-09-088:12 I suspect the human worker still had a headset to listen in to the orders at the drive-through and just intervened when she heard that order.
By JKCalhoun 2025-09-0812:58 Regardless, looks like you can't replace everyone with A.I. just yet.
By ggghgcdd 2025-09-0723:59 [flagged]
This is solved easily by one additional sanity check API call to a different AI. I’m not sure why people think these bugs are like, complete showstopper insurmountable things. It’s a quick fix.
By shakna 2025-09-0811:35 If Anthropic couldn't achieve that with Project Vend [0], why do you seem to think that everyone else could?
> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-becam...
By Zagreus2142 2025-09-0723:55 Taco Bell knows and controls it's own menu and the valid options are already directly encoded in their POS system, including purchase limits. Why would you call out to a different non-deterministic model instead of validating against the complete and deterministic data you have? Taco Bell can afford 1-2 engineers to manage that
By zamadatix 2025-09-0812:35 This would be better off if the LLM was used for the human interface but traditional logic was used for the ordering API and its sanity checks. I.e. let it be fine the LLM can bug out on occasion, but keep rigorous boundaries around the amount of risk that's associated with.
AIs are not resilient against deliberate attacks, even if you use multiple different models.
By diamond559 2025-09-0815:441 reply Maybe they shouldn't work w/ customers then, retail workers have to deal w/ hostile customers all the time.
By zamadatix 2025-09-0817:10 The net result would surely be retail workers only get to deal with hostile (or just difficult, even) customers while the LLM deals with the easy ones. That's what has happened with every other technology introduced to retail - less "business as usual" and "overhead" work and more "oddball" handling. E.g. the electronic PoS and intercom system already have the same kind of effect.
By jameslk 2025-09-0723:57 It seems so, and yet here we are
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
By ggghgcdd 2025-09-080:18 [flagged]
I don't understand the appeal of drive throughs?s?
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
By cool_dude85 2025-09-0812:561 reply Do you have kids? They cause about a 5-10 year period where getting into or out of a car is a 10 minute project.
By gdbsjjdn 2025-09-0813:26 I don't have kids because I value the 5-10 minutes I save when getting out of my car to interact with people face to face in a restaurant.
By RDaneel0livaw 2025-09-0812:551 reply For me the appeal of drive through is 100% solely just that I get to listen to my own podcasts or music. I don’t carry headphones with me outside of the house so if I get to keep my podcasts going - that’s good enough reason for me.
By trenchpilgrim 2025-09-0813:382 reply What's hermetic about listening to music you like?
There is a joy and psychological benefit to having minor, positive social interactions. If you are mostly seeing your partner and coworkers, or even working from home, you may not realize how little human interaction you have.
This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is also a skill you have to practice or it becomes hard to do.
By ryandrake 2025-09-0818:07 This seems like simply a personal preference, which will be different from person to person. I WFH now, and I can go (and have gone) months without seeing another human being besides my family. I don't feel like this has been "bad" for my brain or for my personal joy or psychological wellbeing.
By trenchpilgrim 2025-09-0822:26 Eh, I hang out with people on the weekends. While shopping I want my headphones in to block all the horrible advertising they play on the speakers.
By GuinansEyebrows 2025-09-0815:28 in a sense (no pun intended), you're sealing yourself off from "the real world" when you listen to podcasts/music on headphones in public.
i used to be a major headphone user but as i've gotten older, i really don't like to isolate myself like that when in public. i've started to enjoy just living in the moment a lot more than when i was younger, and i don't like to appear as antisocial as i often feel, because i actually feel a lot better about myself when i interact with the people around me instead of gliding through life trying to avoid notice.
By jprjr_ 2025-09-0813:33 I think there's a deeply-ingrained sense of being in love with our cars, loving to do things in our cars, etc. We made long commutes via car a thing, and I think a part of that was the drive-through - you could get things quickly on your way to/from work.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
The question mark ("?") is used in English to denote the end of a question.
By gdbsjjdn 2025-09-0813:21 I appreciate your scholarly devotion to the language and it's diverse array of punctuation. In the future you may consider reading the letters in between the punctuation, which are often used to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
By gdbsjjdn 2025-09-0813:27 This makes a lot of sense and as you said probably accounts for fewer than 10% of drive through users.
By supertrope 2025-09-0816:40 Americans' cars are extensions of their bodies.
By aaron695 2025-09-0814:43 [dead]
