UX Emerging Tech | Automated Drive-thru – Proof of Concept

Goal:
Reinvent the Drive-thru Experience by enabling the voice of ‘The Quick Service Restaurant’ with an increasingly capable virtual cognitive agent (VCA) that begins with the drive-thru and evolves to greater store and online features/capabilities.

Approach:
Create a “Quick Service Restaurant” collaboration team, program manage the technology foundation and brand integration. This includes Partner stack, analytics, and AI components, creative teams, and future state virtual experience.

Delivery Teams:
Innovation Design Team: Digital Strategist, Conversation AI Architect, UX Expert, Program Manager, Client, and its Client Partners.
Tasks: Ideate and design MVPs.

Development & Delivery Team: Platform Architects, Developers, Linguists and Testers.
Tasks: Deliver and deploy the MVPs.

Step 1: Understand and Communicate Complexities

Building a Conversational AI (QSR) Quick Service Restaurant ordering system is very different from building a simple question and response system. Interactions are much more conversational, and many contain multiple intents. Recognizing “multiple intents” is an issue with current voice systems.

Example:
You can ask Alexa “What time is it?” and she will tell you.
You can ask Alexa “What the weather is like outside?” and she will answer.
But.. Ask Alexa “What time is it and what’s the weather like outside?” she will respond “Sorry I don’t know that one.”

Additionally is it more challenging than building an ordering app. Apps have defined touch/input points plus strict user flows and thus can easily control how input is received. Conversational interactions are “looser” and must be designed to “attempt to guide” by using audio and/or visual tools that prompt the user to input the data in a manner conversational AI systems can understand.

In the event the “attempt to guide” fails “safety net protocols” must be in place to take over the interaction.