Imagine this: it is a hot summer day and your brains are sending a stimulus that translates into – “I want a Milk Shake!”. So you go to the nearest McDonald’s restaurant and pull up at the order point in the Drive Trough. Suddenly, a soft and sweet robotic voice, one of which Alexa would be jealous, welcomes you and asks what you want to order. “Can I have one Big Mac and a Diet Coke, please”. Of course, you order something entirely different than you initially planned. The robotic voice, let’s call her McSweety, then repeats your order, asks for conformation, and sends you to the next window. With McDonald’s acquiring Apprente, a voice-based tech company specialized in speech recognition, this is becoming a viable future.
In doing so, the fast-food giant has developed a vision where the way we order our hamburgers and french fries will become more automated. With this technology – which can understand orders spoken aloud – McDonald’s wants to develop automatic interaction in the Drive Trough. So, the main pros look simple: a more efficient and faster order experience for their customers and an increased degree in automated labor which can lead to savings on the payroll. Moreover, the technology should be able to handle complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item orders. But I do wonder what happens when there is a heavy storm outside and a customer with loud hip hop music banging out of his stereos is still hesitating about his order? Does he get an Mc(w)Rap?
Voice recognition has become a driver for tech innovation. Nowadays, this technology is advancing at an exponential rate in various industries, ranging from fast-food to healthcare, as companies are competing to develop their own voice technology integrations to keep pace with consumer demand. Accordingly, this trend supports the development of voice-recognition technology to become more sophisticated and useful for practice. However, the deficiency of relevant knowledge and experience makes it particularly hard for many companies to adopt a sound voice strategy. In the example of McDonald’s, a partnership or even a take-over could just be the answer.
There is a lot of opportunity for a much deeper and more efficient understanding concerning the implementation of speech recognition in company processes. What do you think the future will hold for us?
Sources:
Bregler, C., & Konig, Y. (1994, April). ” Eigenlips” for robust speech recognition. In Proceedings of ICASSP’94. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Vol. 2, pp. II-669). IEEE.
Gales, M. J., & Young, S. J. (1996). Robust continuous speech recognition using parallel model combination. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 4(5), 352-359.
Juang, B. H., & Chen, T. (1998). The past, present, and future of speech processing. IEEE signal processing magazine, 15(3), 24-48.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/201909/mcdonalds-acquires-apprente-to-bring-speech-recognition-to-drive-thrus
Hi Moises! Before reading your blog I was unaware of this new development, so thank you for enlightening me! McDonald’s business model seems highly suitable for pioneering in voice recognition, since the fastfood chain offers a finite number of items and has a relatively predictable interaction paradigm. This bring far less challenges as opposed to free-ranging voice assistants (https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-acquires-apprente-voice-ai/). Also, according to Raúl Castañón-Martínez, the specific technology Apprente is offering is well suited for noisy environments (https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-acquires-apprente-voice-ai/). Therefore, the system should even work in heavy weather, on which you expressed your reservations. However, I do worry the innovation will have a negative impact on the experience of going to a drive through, since talking to a machine might feel very unpersonal. What are your thoughts on this?
Hi Bo! Thank you for addressing these findings. I do think that McDonald’s is making a smart move by integrating voice recognition in their Drive-Trough. With new offerings like for example Table Service, they clearly focus on a strategy in which personalization happens for the biggest part inside the restaurant. It could be the case that McDonald’s wants the Drive-Trough to focus more on customers that just want quick service and immediately continue to there destination? However, with this new development, only the order process will be affected. Payment of the order and receiving the items will still be done by employees that greet you and wish you a nice meal.