Bacon ice cream? Voice bot ditch after glitch

Handful of butter, anyone? Hundreds of chicken nuggets? Ice cream loaded with bacon?

These are just some of the hilariously off-the-mark orders to have resulted from the use of voice bot technology at McDonald's drive-thrus to have prompted the fast food giant to ditch a form of its ordering AI tech.

McDonald's is reverting to human-only service in its drive-thrus across America after a raft of wrong orders caused by voice-automated ordering systems being tested across 100 of its sites since 2021. A partnership with IBM to develop the controversial voice bot technology was announced in 2019, with many questioning the impact this would have in making jobs obsolete. 

After three years, McDonald's has decided to pull the plug after various online accounts of drive-thru order misfires, as first reported by Restaurant Business.