IRVINE, Calif. -- We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first ... erudite, order-taking robot.
Taco Bell may be inventing something that c-stores most want to replicate: the always-friendly employee. And not just a friendly person, but a vitual entity programmed to become your friend.
Irvine, Calif.-based Taco Bell is using the term "artificial intelligence" to describe its upcoming food-ordering app, TacoBot, which is in beta test and “getting ready for prime time.”
Now it's easy to think this development would be far-fetched or irrelevant for c-stores, but food ordering is the channel's next unexplored frontier, and this particular development has a solid foundation (not to mention crazy innovation) beneath it. So bear with me.
Taco Bell's new food-ordering app resides within Slack, which is a San Francisco-based messaging and group-communications service that Inc. magazine named its 2015 Company of the Year. It went from zero to 1.7 million users—480,000 paid accounts translating to $45 million in annual revenue—in a little more than a year and a half since its February 2014 launch.
Slack’s core business is painfully banal. Taco Bell says, “Slack is a powerful messaging platform that makes working with groups better. The ultimate goal is to get you working less and living more so Slack made things like centralizing conversations, sharing files and communicating via GIFs way easier.”
At face value, Slack is about code, schema and protocols, but according to Inc., users have a passionate attachment to the brand. Its founders literally intended the product and the company to be “fun, thoughtful, humane, whimsical and erudite.”
Welcoming messages such as “What cannot be accomplished on such a splendid day?” or “You look nice today” endear users and foster a sense of familiarity and neighborliness.
With its programmable host, Slackbot (any relation to TacoBot?), users can customize the service. Inc. said one company programmed Slack to work with a sign-in software so when guests signed in at their office, a dossier on that person would automatically go to its staff.
TacoBot will be available to Slack users and seems to mimic the core ideas behind Slack. “TacoBot is a new friend and should be treated as such upon a quick install," the company said. "Start asking it questions about our menu, see how it’s feeling or find out what its favorite movie is. From there, connect your ta.co account, choose your pickup location and order up your favorite Taco Bell item. TacoBot is ready to serve.”
They're inferring that TacoBot can be your next dependable, cheerful friend, not just for that future, perfect burrito but its best wine paring or what to wear on a second date.
That’s a stretch, of course, and an extremely tough challenge. According to howstuffworks.com, one of the top 10 hardest things to get a robot to do is carry on a conversation. The problem is deciphering language and all its variants. As an example, English-speaking people can automatically tell the word “new” from “knew.” That’s not easy for a robot. It takes more complicated commands to put words into context. An example would be the word “bat.” If words like “fly” or “wings” accompanied the word, then the computer would think of the animal. If “strike” or “ball” were the case, then it would think baseball. It all happens with huge collections of text, allowing the computer to “learn” based on statistical analysis.
Now I'm sure you're thinking that creating a fun, thoughtful, humane, whimsical and erudite robot is just as hard as actually being a fun, thoughtful, humane, whimsical and erudite person, but a lot of folks want this to happen, as should c-stores.
Will your next best friend be a robot? I suppose, like Pinocchio and Taco Bell, we can all wish.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.