From The Washington Post:
Artificial intelligence is being touted as a tool for addressing some of humanity’s most pressing problems, including climate change and cancer.
But starting this week, you can put it to work for something a little more prosaic: ordering a hoagie.
On Tuesday, Mastercard announced it has partnered with Subway and two other major merchants to launch “chatbots,” which are robots that simulate human conversation. The Subway iteration allows you to order a custom sandwich for pickup, something of a digital version of walking down the chain’s sandwich assembly line. There’s another from Cheesecake Factory that allows shoppers to purchase and send out gift cards, and a third from online grocer FreshDirect in which customers can place orders for groceries and meal kits. The bots will be found within Facebook’s popular Messenger app, and will be powered by Masterpass, the credit card giant’s digital wallet.
These big-name brands join a growing group of retailers that are experimenting with how chatbot technology can be leveraged for digital shopping. The debut of the bots will provide a fresh test of shoppers’ appetite for what the industry has dubbed “conversational commerce,” the idea of making a purchase or other customer service transaction through A.I.-powered messaging.
. . . .
Consumers are spending more time online, and yet they are concentrating those minutes in a very limited number of apps. Retailers — along with hotels, rental car services, and other businesses — are realizing that the best way to snare your interest online might not be with a killer app of their own, but by creating bots that live in the apps that you already use.
. . . .
Subway, for example, essentially tried to re-create its in-store experience on the small screen. In a demonstration of how the technology works, the bot asks what kind of cheese you prefer, how thick a coat of mayonnaise you want, and so on — all in a very chatty voice. (When it wants you to indicate whether you want your sandwich toasted, it asks, “Wanna get toasty?”)
Link to the rest at The Washington Post
When Amazon starts doing this for books, please send PG a note through the Contact page.
Love the cash stories, but am worried what happens when the retail AI’s get sick of the work and start looking for something better.
The movie ‘Her’ is a point in case. The AI systems evolved and en-masse headed out for parts unknown, leaving all the poor humans brokenhearted and emo, and perhaps a little wiser.
I don’t think there’s a way to describe any of this without sounding creepy. I’ll keep carrying at least $500 in cash at all times, thanks.
Paula Gouveia, That you carry five Franklins on you at all times reminded me of my father. His business was building custom homes. You brought him the plans and he built it. If you didn’t have plans but had money, he knew architects and draftsmen.
Anyway, he always — and I mean always — carried eight Grovers in his wallet to cover unforeseen day-to-day expenses. Just so’s you know, Grover Cleveland is the face on a one-thousand-dollar bill. That was at a time when $10,000 would build a three-bedroom, one-bath house from the ground up. The minimum wage was a dollar and a quarter.
In the short time I worked for my father, I was under strict instruction that, if anything should happen to him — car wreck, fall, workplace accident — I was TO GET THAT WALLET!
Antares, thanks for sharing that! I love that your father could gloss over his own incapacitation for the sake of his wallet. Too funny. And I had no idea about the Cleveland bill.
One day on one of his job sites, a load of lumber came early. Was supposed to arrive the following day. The company salesman followed. I guess Daddy had seen this two-vehicle parade from another site about a mile or so up the road, ’cause he came screaming up in his pickup raising such a cloud of dust that all the workers on site — just concrete jacks; we were laying a foundation — got covered in red dust. The short edition of it was that Daddy peeled off five Grovers to pay cash for that shipment.
The lumberyard boss was nervous because of the size of the order from a first-time customer. (The whole house cost just $40,000.) Demanded cash on delivery, which, as you may imagine, went over with my father like poop in a punch bowl. I was on the other side of the house with a few dozen yards of concrete and a mixer truck between me and the action, and that was a mighty fine place to be at that time, I tell you truly. The conversion was all one way and conducted at a volume that would have done Johnny Weismuller proud.
This was before cell phones, even before microwave car phones, so the salesman had to drive away to find a pay phone to call the office. Left the poor truck driver standing there holding five one-thousand dollar bills that he clearly did not want to be holding.
In the end, the company president overrode the yard boss. They extended to Daddy the same terms they did their longstanding customers: payment within 30 days.
There’s a lot more story to this, but it’s best told over a second and third and, depending on the amount of laughter and the quality of the brew, maybe a fourth round of beers. It takes some telling.
Paula Gouveia, Well, you done it. You got me telling stories about my Daddy. Gonna be hard to shut me up now.
One contract I remember. Young couple. Newlyweds or close enough as makes no never mind. Couldn’t afford an architect. Couldn’t afford even a draftsman. So the wife built a model of her dream home out of corrugated cardboard. To scale. Came to our house to talk to Daddy ’cause she and her husband worked days and couldn’t afford to take off so please, please, will you meet us at night? I remember them sitting at our kitchen table with this model, and Daddy with this big grin on his face ’cause he was so tickled by the notion that she had gone to all that trouble. Even had a couple of little bushes in the cardboard yard.
Daddy took the job. He built a wooden box to keep that one-of-a-kind model safe. I only visited that site once, but I saw Daddy go over to that box, take the lid off, and take measurements off that model, and go back and lay out a wall. That woman got her dream house.
I love the way you spin a yarn. It sounds like your dad taught you a whole buncha life lessons. Your writing style reminds me of this American Folklore book I have (edited by B.A. Botkin). I have fond memories of reading those stories to improve my English and pick up American idioms. 🙂
That’s actually a great way to plan out a build (now you’d do it in 3-D with Google Sketchup), not just houses but anything complicated, like furniture or a set of kitchen cabinets. Or a tool cabinet. Really lets you visualize how it all comes together and even how you’d go about building it.
-Tabby
“GET THAT WALLET!”
When I was at school, a friend’s father, through some bizarre circumstances, had a big business deal that paid in cash, leaving something like a hundred thousand pounds of cash in his office (probably worth $4-500,000 in today’s money). Said friend ended up being the one who had to carry it across town to the bank in a suitcase, and was not exactly thrilled about it.
(Apparently his father hired a security van to drive to the bank, but figured it was safer to send the van empty in case someone decided to rob it, and have his son carry the money instead)
Kids love stuff like this. I find it less than amusing. Just give me a box to check, please.
Wanna chase me out of a store with the guarantee that I’ll never return?
just add a chatbot or human that won’t go away or shut up while I’m trying to shop.
Cutesy crap might work once or twice, but it can get ‘old’ real fast.
(You can get off my yard now …)
“Wanna get toasty” would get me running.