McDonald’s is removing artificial intelligence (AI) powered ordering technology from its drive-through restaurants in the US, after customers shared its comical mishaps online.
A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019.
It has not proved entirely reliable, however, resulting in viral videos of bizarre misinterpreted orders ranging from bacon-topped ice cream to hundreds of dollars’ worth of chicken nuggets.
A computer: does anything.
Tech journalists: is this AI?
Voice recognition is “AI“*, it even uses the same technical architecture as the most popular applications of AI - Artificial neural networks.
* - depending on the definition of course.
Well, given that we’re calling pretty much anything AI these days, it probably fits.
But I honestly don’t consider static models to be “AI,” I only consider it “AI” if it actively adjusts the model as it operates. Everything else is some specific field, like NLP, ML, etc. If it’s not “learning,” it’s just a statistical model that gets updated periodically.