Drive through might be a bit more difficult for touch screens. It'd be like trying to reach your parking ticket but for how many clicks it takes to make the order.

Phone app might be easier but not sure it really replaces what drive throughs are for.

That seems overengineered as hell to me. But then, having an entire LLM to do what much older voice recognition software could do better is overengineered by definition. The LLM won't validate those things because the point of it, if it has one at all in this scenario, is for it to recognize off the cuff speech and malformed orders.

Which is partly why people are finding this idea doesn't work, I suppose. Have a chatbot improvise based on what people are shouting and you get garbage inputs. Have strict requirements for voice commands and you get lots of failed attempts.

Unlike a bunch of other applications of AI chatbots this one maaaay eventually work. But then again, so may your idea. Honestly, if I was going to overengineer the shit out of having a tortilla-wrapped laxative inside a car I'd have you order directly in your phone and use that license plate recognition idea to prevent you having to talk to anybody or anything in the first place.

Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?

"Would you like some Ozempic or insulin with that?"

No. This makes no sense. Are you seriously saying if you saw an order for 18,000 waters pop up on your monitor you'd just say "that's fine" then spend the next three days straight filling cups?

If I were the manager of the store, I'd hope my employees would have the bare minimum critical thinking skill to ask someone first.

At the store I worked in, everyone would be given at least 12 hours notice of a catering order. We'd have everything prepped ready to go, and expect the order when it arrives. If one popped up without notice it's definitely a bug, and we're definitely not making it.

As for the water order? I would 1000% start making that order.

What a self-own

I worked at a pizza place with a drive through. We sold many items that were non-pizza like wings, subs, salads, burgers, desserts and side items like fries, mozz, etc. My girlfriend's family owned the place, so I was familiar with more than just grunt work and had some inside insight into the business numbers that normal workers do not get.

We would never have fulfilled an 18,000 water cup request.

If someone came by with a catering sized order in the drive through, we would have had them park somewhere and told them a relative estimate of how long it would be. Sure, maybe someone would have started on a couple of things, but we wouldn't be able to fulfill such large orders in the time it took between placing an order and the window. There's only so many workers.

There was obviously plenty of food waste, but that's baked into the cost of the items.

Yep, we definitely don't have any kind of law prohibiting a business from disposing of food waste en masse.

We do have a ton of liability laws that would punish them from distributing leftover food though, should someone get sick after it is distributed.

Also don't have any kind of thing preventing households from wasting food either. I suspect countless of perfectly fine meals are disposed of every single day, probably enough to feed the country twice over, if not more.

It's a tough problem in a land of excess without near-total elimination of privacy and agency.

Depends on the restaurant.

There’s one McDonald’s nearby that’s wrong like 80% of the time, but A&W is right almost always for me.

Wait people eat at A&W? Is it any good?

There are multiple around me and I feel like I never see anyone in them and I myself have never been in 40+ years.

I have been to most every other fast food place more times than I can remember.