CNN, New York — Before long, there could be just one person standing in the way of your cheesy Gordita Crunch. By the end of the year, Taco Bell will roll out artificial intelligence speech technology in its drive-thrus to hundreds of US stores, Yum! Brands, the company's parent, announced on Wednesday.
Due to this change, customers may expect to speak with a machine rather than a live person when they call or come in to place an order at a Taco Bell. 
Not just Taco Bell, but other fast-food chains are now experimenting with letting consumers converse with AI at their drive-thrus in an effort to increase sales and free up staff time for other duties. But Taco Bell's growth coincides with a major competitor experiencing difficulties attempting to employ comparable technologies.
Following complaints from customers that the system was mistaking their orders, McDonald's said last month that it was discontinuing the AI ordering technology it was testing at more than 100 drive-thrus in the US. The McDonald's AI drive-thru system resulted in bizarre orders for some customers, as seen by viral videos of the woman who didn't actually want nine sweet teas and the girl who yelled "stop" at the screen after it totaled more than twenty-two orders of chicken nuggets.
It's not astounding that AI found it difficult to function properly in a drive-through environment. AI speech recognition techniques can be confused by loud settings, and the technology has to be trained on large volumes of voice samples in order to accurately recognize the whole gamut of human dialects and speech patterns. And we've all had the annoying sensation of wanting so much to speak with a human while on the other end of a broken computer assistant.
However, Yum! Brands' chief innovation officer, Lawrence Kim, told CNN he is optimistic that the company's technology, which is now in operation at 100 Taco Bell stores in 13 states, won't experience the same problems. Rather, he asserted, the technology has really resulted in increased ordering accuracy, contented staff members, and reduced drive-through wait times.
In an interview, Kim stated, "We are confident that we've approached this the right way." She also mentioned that it has taken two years of testing, obtaining input from staff members and customers, and advancing technology to get this stage. Delicious! Beyond mentioning that it currently receives $30 billion in sales—roughly 50% of its total revenue—from digital-first ordering channels, brands did not offer statistics on the gains they claimed to have witnessed as a result of AI ordering.
Kim refused to say which tech companies Yum! collaborated with to create the AI ordering system.