I can actually see this bein' one task that current levels of language models would excel at, honestly... Given the limited list of items on a typical fast-food menu, and the accuracy of even some of the lowliest modern language models and speech recognition, I see no reason why fast-food order-taking needs to be handled by humans at all anymore, especially if you confirm the final order with the human ordering before proceeding; I could honestly see that bein' much more accurate than a human doing that job. (I can't count how many times over the years I've had a human order-taker completely screw the order up despite them repeating the order back exactly as given. A well-designed LLM-based system likely shouldn't have that problem. What it repeats back should end up bein' exactly the order that the system pushes through to completion.)

It's not clear what the problem is. Is it that the mic quality is not good enough for an AI? Is it that the AI is not smart enough? Is it that people generally don't like AI taking orders? Is the latency not good enough?

Or is it that people prefer to preorder on the phone instead and pick up?

Ok? Taco Bell is taking ai orders at drive throughs right now.

There's no AI needed for that either. Just order on your phone, drive there, scan, machine dispenses your order and goodbye.

Much like how when you go to one of these places >>right now<< you just walk up to a kiosk, input your order, pay, then collect your order at the desk.

Couple more years and we'll rediscover that vending machines exist.