It was funny reading all the stories today on how apparently there are McDonald’s in the world that are trying out fully automate drive throughs where people would be ordering from a robot that tries to voice recognition to take orders. As expected, they don’t work many times such as when someone requests for items they don’t have it will just automatically substitute the item for something else. Imagine asking for Pepsi when they only have Coke and the robot will just display that versus explaining that they don’t carry Pepsi. There were still human employees on hand to fix the issue.
This all seems way too early as technology hasn’t quite caught up yet for this. I would think at this point if you were trying to automate something then having people be able to manually input an order or say order from an app to just drive through and pick it up would be a safer bet at this point. But it makes you think too where you obviously have to try something to make it better. So would it be a good idea in these examples to just release your unproven platform for the public to try as if they were beta testers for your company?
Companies do this all the time of course such as releasing items in smaller markets first before going to bigger ones. Can you ever truly get anything like this fully working as hoped before launching? Because there I could see one never actually trying something new if it needs to be perfect too.