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Drive-Through Chatbots
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The next time you pull into a drive-through, it might not be a person taking your order. Instead, it could be an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program. This summer, the fast-food chain Wendy’s began testing an A.I. chatbot that can simulate human conversation to take verbal orders from customers. To do its job, the program—which was developed with Google—must know when to ignore background noises and how to understand confusing orders; it was trained to recognize that a “Frosty” is a milkshake and “J.B.C.” is a junior bacon cheeseburger, for example. Wendy’s officials say they want the bot to reduce wait times, not replace workers. And for now at least, employees will need to monitor the A.I. to make sure customers get what they asked for. “You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for A.I.,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told The Wall Street Journal, “but it’s actually one of the hardest.”