The next time you’re traveling through another country, you might want to keep your eyes on the local fast food chains, because Burger King has just unveiled a new way to order food: just use Facebook. The fast food chain is at the forefront of a movement already begun by places like Taco Bell in which their primary hope seems to be the total obliteration of human interaction in the restaurant space (and who’s mad about that?).
The new feature piggybacks on an announcement made by Mark Zuckerberg at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. According to Fortune, the software “allows companies to build artificially intelligent software to interact with customers through Messenger.”
Essentially, the Burger King bot allows potential customers to sign on to their Facebook app and place an order with a robot who will ask you specific questions about your food before passing your order on to a nearby store. Here it is in action.
At a glance, it seems a pretty intuitive ordering system that will — let’s be honest — probably have zero impact on the speed or convenience with which you receive your food. The program has just begun to roll out overseas and in airports, though Burger King is keeping the initiative small (and virtually anonymous) at the moment presumably to fix any issues that might crop up.
The Facebook Messenger capability is expected to roll out to Whopper-loving people everywhere in the coming months.
