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.
ignoring the distopian nightmare, this shit isn’t free to run. Hiw the hell would they justify this expense?
Eh, to my knowledge, something like OpenAIs Whisper API for audio transcription is only $0.006/min, so $8.64 for an entire day’s worth of audio. From there, you could run some basic non-AI heuristics to determine if keywords were uttered or not per customer interaction.
That’s their trying to get people hooked on AI pricing. That’s not sustainable though, They’re only able to charge that price because they get special deals on the electricity, but that’s not going to last.
Eventually all the companies are going to have to put their prices up once investment money runs out
Whisper is actually one of OpenAI’s few open models and can just be run locally on your own system(s). No price traps here. Unethical and horrible? Yes. Technically and financially feasible for BK? Also yes :(.
My company is doing something similar with AI (although not quite this this awful) and I can tell you from various meetings that I’ve been in that management really doesn’t have a clue how AI works. I think it’s just a magic box.
The current genius plan is to run all of this locally on a big server farm, I don’t think they have yet realised how expensive it’s going to be due to price spikes, ironically because of AI. I highly doubt that it will ever actually come to fruition, or will get some incredibly watered down thing that barely operates but management obsess over for 6 months, until they inevitably stop caring.
I would place good money on a bet that says that 2 years from now they will not be using this.