Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

McDonald’s plans to serve up artificial intelligence at its drive-thru windows

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

McDonald’s is exploring ways to automate its drive-thru service with the help of artificial intelligence.

This means you could soon be chatting with a robot rather than a human when you pull up to place your order.

Recommended Videos

Helping the fast-food giant in its high-tech endeavor is Silicon Valley-based Apprente, which McDonald’s revealed this week it has agreed to acquire.

Apprente was founded in 2017 to create a voice-based, conversational platform for complex, multilingual, multi-accent, and multi-item conversational ordering.

According to McDonald’s, Apprente’s technology, which is already being tested at select restaurants, will pave the way for “faster, simpler, and more accurate order taking at the drive-thru.” Because no one likes to get an Egg McMuffin when you order a Big Mac.

McDonald’s has been turning increasingly to technology in a bid to boost its bottom line. Besides this latest acquisition, the company earlier this year also snapped up Dynamic Yield.

The Israel-based machine-learning startup specializes in so-called “decision technology” that’s already undergoing tests with electronic menu boards located at McDonald’s drive-thrus.

Aimed at offering a more personalized customer experience, the items on the menu can change automatically and quickly according to a range of factors. For example, it might place various food and drink options front and center according to your opening choice (large fries with that cheeseburger?). It could also focus on cold drinks in hot weather, and show breakfasts in the morning. If the restaurant is particularly busy, it might push items that are quicker to prepare, thereby easing the pressure on the kitchen.

Dynamic Yield’s technology is currently deployed at more than 8,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the U.S., with plans to take it to almost all of its drive-thrus by the end of the year.

McDonald’s also recently invested in mobile app vendor Plexure to work on the development of its global app for mobile.

As part of McDonald’s ongoing efforts to enhance its business with cutting-edge technology, the Apprente team will be the founding member of a new, integrated group within McDonald’s Global Technology team, called McD Tech Labs. In the coming months and years, McDonald’s said it plans to expand its presence in Silicon Valley with the hiring of more tech experts as it seeks to develop future innovations.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
Chinese startup claims its brain implant takes just 10 minutes to place, no skull surgery required
StairMed Technology's vein-based BCI could beat Neuralink's roughly two-hour surgery on speed, but the device still hasn't undergone human trials.
Art, Plate, Crystal

Brain implants, like the ones made by Elon Musk's Neuralink, typically involve open-skull surgery. But a Chinese startup says it can skip that step entirely, threading its device into the brain through a vein in a procedure that reportedly takes as little as ten minutes. According to the South China Morning Post, Shanghai-based StairMed Technology is one of several companies pursuing this approach, as the country pushes to expand its homegrown brain-computer interface (BCI) industry.

Faster than Neuralink, on paper

Read more
This bizarre email flaw is leaking corporate secrets to anyone who buys the right domain
Security researchers discovered companies are accidentally sending sensitive emails to domains that outsiders can register.
Maill app icon notifications

You don't always need to hack into a company's systems to get its secrets. Sometimes, the company will simply email them to you. A new report by WIRED's Matt Burgess has uncovered a bizarre email security problem in which companies are inadvertently sending sensitive information to domains that can be registered and controlled by outsiders. Security researchers Cory Solovevich and Mike Sheward discovered that seemingly harmless addresses such as noreply and deleteduser can become unexpected gateways to corporate information when the domains behind them aren't properly controlled.

The "hack" is buying the right domain

Read more
I found 3 ChatGPT features that turned out to be way more useful than I expected
ChatGPT on iPhone

I use ChatGPT pretty much every day, but somewhere along the way, I’ve also developed a habit of poking around and looking for features I haven’t tried yet. Some discoveries are genuinely useful, while others are the kind I’ll probably remember once every six months.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something that actually changes how I use ChatGPT. That happened recently with three features I’d somehow been overlooking. I’ve started using all three regularly now, and if you spend a lot of time in ChatGPT too, I think you’re missing out by not giving them a shot.

Read more