Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say 'Please' and 'Thank You' (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180863546
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/26/163233/burger-king-will-use-ai-to-check-if-employees-say-please-and-thank-you
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/884911/burger-king-ai-assistant-patty
> Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also [1]evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness."
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> Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/884911/burger-king-ai-assistant-patty
What are they going to do? (Score:2)
Fire them? Eat shit BK, your minimum wage job is not worth putting up with this bullshit.
Re: What are they going to do? (Score:3)
I shouldn't but it tastes so good :(.
Re: (Score:2)
It's just churn anyway, lol. Burger King employees will be hired back as McD's employees, and McD's will be hired back as BK employees. They'll switch back and forth, and hopefully the consumer will win here (because each time, they get trained), getting better quality / better service. Maybe in an ideal world...
Re: (Score:2)
And if they do too poorly they'll get hired at Taco Bell. If they're too high for even that, they end up at Jack in the Box.
> Maybe in an ideal world...
I think it's more about where firing puts you at risk of not finding something else. You're already at the bottom, you're not losing anything. And they are all hiring.
Re: (Score:2)
Where I live, Burger King is actually much slower that Taco Bell. They are across from each other and I can see the other drive thru while in one. Taco Bell will have several cars through in the time it takes to be acknowledged, have order taken, pay and receive the order from Taco Bell. McDonalds is slow as well, just no sense of urgency from the workers. I used to at McD's back in the early 90's and back then the managers wanted you to move quickly to get an order out.
Grow up. (Score:1)
> Fire them? Eat shit BK, your minimum wage job is not worth putting up with this bullshit.
Thank you for demonstrating why we need this employment filter at this level instead of waiting until they become grown-ass children in the corporate workplace where the rest of us have to put up with their DEI bullshit.
A lack of manners, is a form of incompetence. If you can't manage to compose yourself when dealing with the public for this job, you're not worthy of it or any other job.
You have a hell of a way of missing the fucking point.
Re: (Score:2)
Self reflection would do you wonders. Maybe your food would have less spit in it.
Re: (Score:2)
> If you can't manage to compose yourself when dealing with the public for this job, you're not worthy of it or any other job
Well there is the job of entitled asshat which doesn’t require composure. Sadly demand is low and supply is high, but you could help out by vacating the post so one of these “grown-ass children” can take a job you believe they are qualified for. I’m not sure they will have your natural talent though.
Re: (Score:2)
> A lack of manners, is a form of incompetence. If you can't manage to compose yourself when dealing with the public for this job, you're not worthy of it or any other job.
But can you measure it by counting the number of "Please" and "Thank you"? Like every benchmark, this one is so simplistic, it is easy to game, and people, when they are in a bad mood, will just murmur "please, please, please" all the time. And for me, formal manners of people serving me food is very far down on the priority list. Cleanliness would rank much higher, and the highest rank is serving what I actually ordered. I take a perfectly prepared burger from a disgruntled worker every time compared to ha
Re: Grow up. (Score:2)
I think you missed the point. Nobody is going to put up with some AI rat listening to rhem all the time for a bottom of the barrel job that's a dime a dozen. How are you so fucking stupid?
Oh man (Score:2)
What a great time to be entering the workforce these days.
Where you are expected to be surveilled at all times, make basically no money and expected to output 3x as much due to AI assistance...
Re: (Score:1)
Businesses have always wanted hyperproductive employees. Adding another excuse to demand it changes approximately nothing. They won't demand even harder and they won't get any more performance if they do.
Re: (Score:2)
We can see AI being proposed everywhere. What we do not see is the productivity gains we were promised in the sales slide deck.
AI Detects Tone of Voice? (Score:2)
Manna (Score:2)
Oh man, they read this [1]here [marshallbrain.com] and then decided to implement the Torment Nexus... It's well worth reading by the way.
[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, I thought of Burger-G right away...I wasn’t sure anyone else had ever read that book though!
It is too bad I can’t find (or rember the name of) most of the k5k faction I loved, since k5k vanished before I snarfed any copies!
Agentic AI? (Score:2)
Have the AI say "please" and "thank-you" if it's so important. Are local managers that useless??? Or are they the premium wage currently getting in the way of profits?
Re: (Score:2)
Managers can only enforce the forced formulaic politeness when they are around. To get dystopian enforcement of arbitrary rules you need some sort of robotic enforcers. I mean the current ones can only be so effective without the direct feedback of a built in taser.
I demand that my midnight BK whoppers are served with the a lifeless greeting and formulaic sign off. (and to be fair there is no BK around here, and last time I had one near by I stopped going because they “only accept cash” on
Feel sorry for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps I'm in the minority but I genuinely don't care for false pleasantries especially forced ones. I just want to give some money and get something in return. In this case a burger.
Re: (Score:2)
I have experienced trying to order from a fast food joint in a country where I didn't speak the language very well. The employees are so ingrained in what to say and not say that if you ask them to rephrase because you don't understand what they're saying they completely lock up. They literally can't think of a different way to ask if that will be all today. I guess that's what the powers that be truly want - a working class entirely incapable of independent thought.
Re: (Score:2)
They'll learn that it's only checking for please and thank you, and say: "Please go F yourself. Thank you for F-ing yourself."
Is this what we get with AI (Score:2)
to be surveilled? You think that's going to make your employees happy? It will definitely make your employees fake. People can tell when you are fake.
Forced politeness (Score:2)
is not politeness. What this plan *may* do is rotate out people until the ones who are genuinely polite get to the customer-facing positions. It may also devalue politeness to the point of being worthless. Regardless of the mechanism behind the scenes, people are going to be suspicious of whomever is interacting with them.
Re: (Score:2)
The ones who are naturally polite will quit after the second time they had ONE interaction in which they forgot to say thank you or the customer was so rude there was no way to actually be polite rather than merely cordial.
If AIs are evaluating me... (Score:4, Funny)
Customer: "Gimme a burger and a large fries."
Me: "Please, thank you for your order. Thank you, please, a burger and a large fries, thank you please?
Customer: "Yup and I'm in a hurry."
Me: "Please, thank you, one thank you burger and a please large fries, please, thank you.
Customer: "This place is weird. I'm outta here." *runs out door*
The Newspeak police is watching you. (Score:2)
EOM
Yuck (Score:2)
I walk into a Burger King about once a decade, and not one single time have I been served food that wasn't soggy and cold.
This is how we fully enable Idiocracy (Score:2)
It starts with please and thank you. It'll quickly escalate to making sure you say all the cutesy bullshit they expect you to say, including the stuff that makes the customers uncomfortable. We'll go from "how do we make it your way" which some places enforce today to some full-blown paragraph full of marketing drivel, including whatever the daily discount is, specifically designed to debase the employee and embarrass the hell out of the customer in the process.
I've got a relative that works for a realtor t
Re: (Score:2)
"Go away! Batin'! ...
Please."
Wrong metric (Score:2)
I don't care if the minimum wage wage slave says please and thank you. I want tasty food at a decent price. Problem is, then the C suite needs to look into the mirror instead of blaming some powerless minion.
Going for gold... (Score:2)
...in the olympics of AI misuse
Trying to make life even more miserable for their employees
Two ways this will backfire (Score:2)
First, I would expect to have this interaction:
Customer (C): Hi, I would like a cheeseburger and fries.
Employee (E): Sure a-hole, would you please wait till I ask for your order, thank you a-hole.
Second, I would expect to have this interaction:
C: Hey scum sucking minimum wage a-hole, get me a burger NOW.
E: Please do not use profanity, thank you.
You want your employees to be cheerful? Try making their work environment pleasant. Pay them well, do not overwork them, let them take home food for free, let them
Out of touch management (Score:3)
Know why they are implementing this? They want to show the board and shareholders they are using "AI".
If they really wanted to improve the food or overall dining experience, they would take care of their supply chain issues, food quality issues, and cleanliness issues in the stores.
I haven't been to a Burger King in over 6 months and I have no plans on going back. I ordered 2 burgers and the buns were very stale and one of the side items I ordered was unavailable so I just ordered the burgers. I tried a different Burger King about a month after the first one and was appalled by the dirt and garbage along the walls and floor in the dining area. Against my better judgement, I ordered a Bacon King meal and was rewarded with lukewarm meat and stale buns again for the low, low price of $15-$16 dollars.
I can get a burger at my local pub or brewery for that price and the burger comes piping hot with fries or chips and a pint of beer.
Burger King needs to wake up.
Drive-thru consent? (Score:2)
It's going to get to the point where you are assumed to give consent to being recorded just by going through the drive-thru. #1984
My big beef (Score:2)
"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.
The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.
...laura
Needs more... (Score:2)
And penalize them when they say "no problem." It's your job, of course it's not a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you please also analyze the intonation? "THANK YOU!" said in a very sarcastic way is going to be worse than saying nothing at all, lol.
And this shouldn't be just a scoring based system, it should allow managers to go back and review the recording, in case there is a discrepancy with things. Challenging the algorithm should result in improved outcomes for future scoring, it shouldn't just slam employees in the same way again. (The system should learn.) Maybe this is all in a "yeah right, and unicorns and
Re: (Score:2)
Saying "thank you!" in a very pleasing voice while showing a middle finger should be acceptable for AI that's analysing voice only, too.
Re: (Score:2)
You're missing the /s right? I'm just being whooshed? Because the last thing I want is for AI to penalize minimum wage workers for casual language, and saying "no problem" instead of "you're welcome".
Re: (Score:2)
No kidding. I've come across someone pitching a fit over someone else saying "no problem" and I just wanted to tell them to shut up.