> The touchscreen in front of my android greeter allowed me to check in with a cellphone number, but my jet-lagged brain forgot to start with the country code. The computer didn’t recognize my number. The robot, now impassive, was no help.
This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
On top of that, it's often much slower than human service. Lots of fast food restaurants have a ordering touchscreen kiosks now, there are some advantages, but ultimately it's a much slower experience because the interface is much less efficient than talking to a human who's using a dedicated piece of hardware that they're trained on.
Yes, but the flip side is that it's much more practical for a McDonald's to have 6 or 8 or 10 ordering kiosks than a bunch of employees taking orders.
Personally I prefer having the gaggle of kiosks because while it's slower, there's a few advantages:
* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above
* Can take my time looking through everything, even with a more complex order, without social pressure of knowing I'm hindering everyone behind me
* Foreign language options when traveling
Of course, it's probably a good idea to have at least one human employee who can at least optionally handle orders in cases where the kiosk doesn't work.
Yeah McDonald’s really gets self serve right. Their kiosks do a good job at exposing options I didn’t know were even possible when human ordering. And if you are tight on budget, you can easily see what each option costs and the alternatives without the social pressure of having to order quickly.
they should really print out or email you a QR code so you can simply repeat your order by re-scanning it on next visit. this would save hours of time re-spent in their laggy UI; okay, i'll do it once, why should i do it twice?
AND they should provide a way to just type in what you want to quickly filter it from a global list of items via fuzzy match.
i'm not even suggesting to incorporate NLP and speech recognition. we have self driving cars, reusable rockets, DALL-E, and GPT-3 in 2022 and still have to waste time manually entering a fast food order?
i'm a weird privacy nut. i dont do apps except a few small ones from f-droid that get no internet access. if i need Uber, i use https://m.uber.com/.
an app to submit an order instead of a proper mobile site? no thanks, i dont need to swallow those twitter and facebook sdks, and god knows what else. the APK is 80MB :D
* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above
It's called fast food for a reason. I spend more time waiting for my food than ordering. If there's a long line it means the restaurant is understaffed. I'd leave in that case.
* Can take my time looking through everything, ...
You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
* Foreign language options when traveling
France. I can see some larger chain restaurants having this feature but no mom and pop shop is going to need or care to translate their menu unless its a tourist destination. And even then it detracts from the native atmosphere and immersiveness. Besides, not many people travel as they don't have the money. (Though perhaps beneficial for immigrants)
> If there's a long line it means the restaurant is understaffed. I'd leave in that case.
Good for you? What even is the point of such a comment?
> You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
Waiter? What kind of places do you think we're talking about?
> I can see some larger chain restaurants having this feature but no mom and pop shop is going to need or care to translate their menu unless its a tourist destination.
Again with an utterly bizarre comment. As if chain restaurants just didn't matter at all, or machine translation software didn't exist?
> Besides, not many people travel as they don't have the money.
Talk about out of touch. At least before the pandemic, there was probably more world travel than there ever had been in history.
> You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
No I can't, because lots of restaurants don't bother to put all possible options and their descriptions or even just a list of non-alcoholic beverages there. Wine cart is always there, but specifying a kind of tea seems like a big no-no. What kind of tea is that? Oh, some random bags which you can check in the kitchen in a few minutes? Do you have apple juice then? How large is it? Can you make it without ice? Maybe you have some other rarer drinks that I like? Can you remove pickles from the burger, even though there were none on the picture, but I've heard from the neighboring table that there are some?
An average kiosk answers all these questions because it _has to_ have buttons for these options. An average menu does not, it relies on me remembering all the possibilities and interacting with a waiter or a cashier.
And I'm not even talking fast-food restaurants where the menu is up at the top, only listing a tenth of the options with pictures, and the rest being written in a small font I'm unable to see without binoculars.
> No I can't, because lots of restaurants don't bother to put all possible options and their descriptions or even just a list of non-alcoholic beverages there.
> An average kiosk answers all these questions because it _has to_ have buttons for these options.
So a restaurant which cant be bothered to list everything in a printed menu is going to list everything in a kiosk? Did you really type all this without thinking?
> So a restaurant which cant be bothered to list everything in a printed menu is going to list everything in a kiosk?
Correct, because in a printed menu you usually don't have things like "no pickles" or "extra onions" because it's assumed you'll tell an employee that vocally, whereas in a kiosk you obviously need to be able to do that in the interface.
In practice, this means that there can be 'hidden options' that people may not be aware of on a printed menu.
It's worth noting this happens with humans too. How often have you called up tech support with a slightly complicated case and the person on the other end was just no help at all either because they lacked knowledge or weren't empowered to assist you with your edge case?
I get the human can probably handle this particular case, but it's not true for a lot of customer service problems.
The problem is it's impossible to build a complete implementation which captures all the complexities of the real world. Well, short of a big text input field which is validated by a human manually/interactively.
I honestly love the McDonalds touch screens because they allow more people to order at the same time (take less space than a register), while also allowing staff to focus on making the food instead of working the register.
The biggest benefit to something like this is however that you can order in your native language basically wherever you are, even if the staff don't know English and they can't accidentally mess up your order.
> This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
The same thing happens when a computer system which is being used by a human crashes. Or a human worker needs to diverge from the happy path in a slightly complicated way.
>This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad.
On the article's anecdote, I'm pretty sure the robot didn't just literally "freeze" but show a message explaining that number is unknown and ask to retry with the right one. The customer couldn't understand the international prefix was missing, and kept reinputing the same thing again and again.
That kind of stuff will regularly happen with human being typing into the form for you, and telling you the system can't find your number. It's after the first or second try that they'll start debugging with you, checking if you changed you number or put your spouse's one, if it's foreign etc. That "traditional" flow doesn't seem too far from the experience the author had, except they perhaps tried 5 or 6 times instead of 2, because in their mind the robot must be dumb in that specific way and can totally react differently the 6th time.
I'd argue the robot setting is kind of the best of both worlds: customers in the happy path will fly through the system, and customers hitting the wall will have staff that are specially ready to work it out with the customer.
PS: even with a half-baked input system, customers who get used to it after the second or third time will still be faster than dealing with staff inputing their info for them. It's a clear advantage for repeaters.
Fast food restaurants employees are not faster at explaining the menu, or showing the payment options, scanning the membership card etc. IME you can't just dump a magic incantation at the cashier and have them remember it all while hitting the right buttons. Some might be capable of that, most are just part time students keeping their mental energy for the next day's lectures.
When our robots [1] provide some sort of screen-based interaction, there's always an option to speak with a human via remote video chat.
There's this misconception that everything needs to be autonomous all the time.
Not only does this not need to be the case... sometimes it's distinctly better to build a system that can accommodate some remote human assistance -- whether that's flexibility, customer service, cultural, or even as a technology assist (e.g. to overcome "last mile" issues until the autonomy catches up). By building 95%-99.9%+ autonomous systems, you learn how to achieve 100% service operations, bootstrap new capabilities, and improve autonomy based on real-world experience.
I think it depends on where you are and even what the economy is like. I experienced bad service in countries that paid low wages and tipping wasn't normal. I experienced bad service when restaurants were shortening hours open because they couldn't find enough people to work and workers could be bad servers and still not get fired. I'd prefer a consistent experience with a robot over inconsistent experience with a human server not to mention not having to tip. And regarding use cases, if 1 out of 10 instances required a human it's still faster than 10 out of 10 instances and don't get me started on "I don't have to write it down I'll remember it all". The robot will remember.
These hangups seems to me like the kind of thing that is going to greatly improve over time. As was mentioned in another reply thread, the kiosks would benefit from being able to simply repeat your order. It's only a matter of time until this is a feature. Similarly, what falls under your definition of "normal use case" is going to slowly expand as the developers become more familiar with what implementations are important (and have better libraries to deal with the routine implementations).
> if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
I’d argue that the majority of users can’t be bothered to RTFM (and the “M” here is usually one sentence above the call to action) and just want someone to do it for them / hold their hand. These customers are a big drain for customer support and ironically make automated support appealing. Meanwhile the legit edge case becomes a casualty of this automation.
> Japan’s Henn na Hotel fires half its robot workforce
> Japan’s Henn na Hotel, which first opened in 2015 with a staff of robots, has cut its robotic workforce after the experience failed to reduce costs or workload for its employees.
> The hotel, which is located in Nagasaki, will reduce its 243-robotic workforce by more than half and return to more traditional human-provided services for guests, though it will maintain a number of robots in areas where it found them to be effective and efficient. Its change of direction can offer lessons for companies that are pursuing robotic solutions for customer-service roles, reports the Business Insider.
Ah, I was at one of those restaurants a couple weeks ago. But the robot was followed around by wait staff who took the food from the robot and put it on your table...
It's a little strange for an article about robots in South Korea to have such a big chunk centered around a Japanese hotel chain. I just checked and they are up to 20 branches in Japan (and also Seoul and New York) [1]
Where are the home-ground American and South Korean novelty robot hotels?
The driving force that makes robots and accompanying automation a foregone conclusion is the requirement that we increase economic productivity. Granted, they're crude, but reviewing robots based on the quality of their human-ness seems to miss the bigger picture and what will drive their adoption.
Automation is really interesting, especially how sometimes some companies are so far ahead of others. Sometimes when I check out of a hotel I still gotta stand in line and talk to a clerk -- which is intensely frustrating, because there's this sense of, "all I need to do is hand in this damn keycard" -- other times I just drop the hotel key in a box. Hell, apparently some hotels you can just check in with an app and use the app to unlock the door.
Today I dropped off a rental car and the employee just scanned a barcode on the windshield and said, "okay just put the keys on the dash, you're good to go". Such a huge improvement over what it used to be, years ago.
I haven't experienced a hotel where I actually need to do any formal "check out" in quite a while. I bet if you just leave with the keycard they will figure it out.
I had it happen to me earlier this year, and yes it was faintly bizarre. Why do they still need this? Similar to, "what exactly is the hotel/flight clerk typing in when I'm checking in? Why do they need to type so much info, when nothing has changed from when I booked the flight?"
That's a fair point. I'm sure more experimentation and optimization in form factor will happen, depending on use case and settings. There's no need to engineer unnecessary humanoid qualities beyond what is necessary due to cost.
I think that’s true and a more casual setting may prevail. Sometimes a part of the restaurant experience is being served and when done well can make for an exceptional experience. I can see myself consuming both depending on time, place and mood.
Geez, as a Korean I routinely feel the western media likes to picture East Asia as some Sci-Fi world.
The mentioned ‘serving robots’ are just a table with wheels, nothing else. No reason for people to feel them as ‘companions’ or such. You just pick your menu in your tablet on the table, and when time passes, the food rolls over. This is not rocket science, people.
The mentioned ‘greeter robot’ is literally a tablet with wheels, and is useful because it doesn’t try to do anything clever; it’s really just a rolling kiosk, and people use them as such.
I mean, like come on. This isn’t anything headline worthy, especially not something to describe East Asians as people who routinely interact with ‘warm-hearted’ humanoid robots.
(Not to mention that 1/3 of the story is about a Japan-heavy robot-concept hotel chain… but that’s a different issue.)
There’s a number of restaurants in LA that use robots for delivering drinks to your table. I found them strange the first time I saw them but eventually they become invisible.
I’ve never yet seen them misbehave in a notable way, but they seem like nothing more than trays with wheels and basic path finding.
Care to share what kind of restaurants are using these? I’m guessing they’re more the cafeteria-style places. My family owns a few fine dining restaurants and are constantly getting sales people trying to sell them robot food runners. It’s always an amusing sales pitch.
Kura Sushi (https://kurasushi.com/) that's mentioned in the comments is one place, but there are also a few others whose names I can't remember in the Sawtelle Japantown. It's worth noting that Kura is highly automated and you don't have to interact directly with staff after you are seated.
All of them basically center their feel around the futuristic automation spiel.
Near me (SE Michigan), I've seen them at 3 locations total: Kura Sushi (a conveyor sushi chain that's starting to enter the market) at 2 locations, and at a small asian boba shop in Lansing named Koala Tea and Bakery. Notably the second of those seems locally owned/operated. There are probably others. I wouldn't call either cafeteria style, though they're also not 'fine dining'.
What's amusing about the sales pitch? (I'm always looking for a laugh.) Amusement is actually what I got out of the article. It was nice to shake the dystopian vibes that I associate with workers being replaced by robots. Something about the hospitality industry and (as described by the author) "bimbly" robots is light and fun.
There was an outfit that was making these to deliver food to hospital patients a few years ago. Don't know if it ever became a thing in hospitals though.
This would easily sway my decision about going to such a restaurant over its competition, once I found out they use these robots. Not having to pay 25+% tip makes a huge difference in my bill.
Sure, these are called counter-serve restaurants. They appear to make up less than 10% of the restaurants in my area. If a restaurant launches as counter-serve, I guess it gets wait-free "technology" for free by accident.
What I'd like is for a "wait free" experience to spread beyond counter-serve. I have, very rarely, seen a QR code I can scan on the table allowing me to order and pay via phone. Then my food just arrives. That's seamless and frustration-free.
I would not mind except for the US’s tipping culture. I would rather bus myself than pay a tip just to have someone walk a few feet to drop off food and pickup plates.
That's similar but what for me the MVP is something I can dump a load from the dryer into and have it all come out folded. Pants, socks, shirts, underwear, towels, etc. From a machine that vaguely matches the API of my existing washer and dryer: There's a door where the stuff goes in, I push a button to start it, and when it's "done" it dings.
I can fold tshirts, for example, faster than that machine, since it looks like it's on the user to sort out the topology of the shirt for the machine.
I remember watching lost in space reruns years ago as a kid.
I re-watched an episode recently as an adult and it was hiliarious.
mrs robinson was doing laundry, and put all the clothes in a washing machine and closed the lid. Then she immediately opened the lid and pulled everything out, it was already neatly folded and in a bag.
(and curiously the machine was sitting outside the spaceship)
I just yesterday went to a Korean restaurant in Orange County CA that had robot waiters.
It was very exciting since I haven't witnessed it in the real world, and my daughter was in awe. Not quite sure how efficient it really was, more a novelty if anything.
I guess a lot of people must want humanoid robots, but they’re mostly in the uncanny valley for me, and the more realistic they are, the more uncomfortable I’d be.
If I had a robotic assistant at home or in the workplace, I’d want something WALL-E like. Emotive lights or even an 8-bit display with expressions is fine. But no hair or anything completely unrelated to function, please.
Also, the robot voice. A while ago, SF movies were projecting robot voices easily distinguishable from human ones. I made peace with the idea that I'd hear something in line with those vocal timbres when the time would come, but nowadays the phone chatbots (and also other use cases where they resort to employing assisted human-robot interaction) are all imitating human voices. I find it jarring, it's like when I figure out that some (human) stranger was trying to trick me by impersonating someone I know.
I’ve come across that one before - I think the problem is the designer’s face is figuratively showing through. Some artists are good at hiding it or some just has a pretty face in real life that it’s not a problem, but in this case the face isn’t working.
This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
On top of that, it's often much slower than human service. Lots of fast food restaurants have a ordering touchscreen kiosks now, there are some advantages, but ultimately it's a much slower experience because the interface is much less efficient than talking to a human who's using a dedicated piece of hardware that they're trained on.