- Burger King is launching Patty, an AI chatbot to assess employee friendliness with customers
- Patty will recognize polite phrases and help with meal preparation via employee headsets
- The chatbot, powered by OpenAI, alerts managers about machine issues and stock shortages
Burker King (BK) is launching an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that will evaluate employees' interactions with customers for 'friendliness'. The chatbot called "Patty" has been trained to recognise certain words and phrases such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you", with managers having access to evaluate how their location was performing on the 'friendliness' index.
Apart from maintaining politeness at the fast food joints, voice-enabled 'Patty' will also assist employees with meal preparation, according to a report in The Verge. The company will be building the chatbot into the headset used by employees.
"This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, told the outlet, adding that the company will also capture the tone of the conversations.
Powered by OpenAI, the chatbot will also be helpful in alerting managers if a machine is down for maintenance or when an item is out of stock.
"Within 15 minutes, the entire ecosystem will remove it from stock, whether you're walking into a restaurant to order from the kiosk, whether you are going to the drive-thru, the digital menu board will be updated," said Roux, highlighting that Patty is piloting in 500 restaurants.
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The Cost Of Politness
While the BK chatbot will be evaluating politeness, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year revealed that being overtly friendly to ChatGPT was costing the company millions of dollars. Users saying phrases such as "please" and "thank you" at the end of their search queries was putting additional computational strain on the systems, leading to an uptick in operational expenses.
Altman revealed the extent of operational costs after a social media user wondered about the price of being polite to AI models. "How much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying "please" and "thank you" to their models," wrote the user.
As the post went viral, Altman replied: "Tens of millions of dollars well spent, you never know."
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