If you had a baby girl way back in 2014, you might have named her Emma or Olivia or Sophie, the top three choices for that year. Or you might have dug deeper into the list, and gone with Harper (#19), Elizabeth (#44) or Sadie (#62). Had you gone just one step further in the rankings you would have chanced upon Alexa, a lovely name meaning "defender of man." A perfect name for a young girl with a promising future.
And then came 2015 and the general release of Amazon's Echo.
The smart speaker that began the revolution gave you the option of answering to a "wake" word of "Amazon," "Echo" or "Computer." But most defaulted to the name of its underlying personal assistant software and called it "Alexa," tainting it for every generation to come. And now you have to go to all way to #536 to find that same name in the list of newborns.
Since then multiple AI based assistants have been rolled out by various companies, and the vast majority of them have female identifiers. Many use names not in general circulation, such as Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). But the point of these things is to make them as human as possible, so calling it Vlingo or Brainia puts it one step behind before it even gets going. And so new systems are tagged with monikers more in the mainstream, with the hopes of having them feel like old friends rather than alien invaders.
The latest example for this is the fast food arena. With 50% to 70% of customers opting to use the drive-up window, companies are looking for ways to streamline that process. And since that scenario is the perfect environment for an AI based intelligent voice response system (a limited list of choices, people talking directly into the microphone, no need of visual human presence), most are at least experimenting with machine-based ordering systems. Which brings us to Julia.
Julia is the computer ordering persona at hamburger chain White Castle. They have plans to roll her out to 100 drive-thru lanes by the end of 2024. She functions like a standard-issue human, asking for your order, telling you the total and then directing you to drive forward to the delivery window. She does have backup: if at any point she gets confused or a customer requests it, an actual person can come on to assist.
Julia joins Tori, the AI ordering system installed in some Panera locations. And while it doesn't have a nom-de-service, the AI ordering system in place at almost half the Checkers and Rally's fast food locations is also bilingual in Spanish, and capable of recognizing and responding in either language. Other players are also testing various systems across the country, including McDonald's, Taco Bell and Del Taco among others, with names to come. One benefit is that AI assistants are less shy about upselling to higher margin items, with the result that Popeyes says drink sales completed with their voice response system have actually increased. Assertive young women to be sure.
It's just one more instance of AI gaining a toehold in areas where human labor used to have no equal. And in the case of Julia, she is not just an order taker, but a lady boss. If your order includes fried foods, she might pass the request off to Flippy 2, a robot specifically designed to work the deep fryers. With no human intervention, it takes the raw chicken, potatoes or onion rings, drops them in the bubbling grease, cooks them to perfection then dumps them out in a tray to be packaged for customers. And her staff may expand: over at Jack In The Box, Flippy is joined by its sibling Sippy, an automated drink filling system.
Alexa and Julia are merely the latest in a throughline that began with HAL in Arhtur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but they certainly won't be the last. Hopefully each will advance the state of the art, and become a force multiplier rather than take a Terminator-esque detour. But it's worth noting that the AI assistant Samantha in Spike Jonze's "Her" didn't go rogue because it murdered other people, but because it dated other people. We can only hope that our biggest problem with AI assistants won't be domination, but heartbreak.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is learning how to use voice commands with more things. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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