[tehwebguy]

Thanks for sharing, everything makes sense except this:

> The problem is all of the real world interface challenges, keeping speakers and microphones working outdoors across many different climates and weather conditions, and temperatures and humidity is incredibly expensive.

I thought this was a solved problem already, by McDonald’s in fact?

[mvid]

I am not the poster, but my guess here is that a point to point or radio setup which just needs to be good enough for humans to understand it (and even then just barely) is likely way worse quality than what would be needed for recording and feeding to a program

[Kerbonut]

Treat each drive through ordering system as an edge compute location, run the software right there and then transmit only the order instead of streaming audio from the ordering system.

[noen]

Edge compute requires field IT for servicing. You can hire 3-4 employees for the price of a single field service specialist.

Servicing industrial edge compute is insanely expensive for B&M businesses. This is a big part of why so many companies have spent the last decade offloading everything humanly possible to public cloud workloads.

[jgalt212]

I don't know if I agree with this. I've had Google and Shazam nail songs that were barely audible to my human ears.

[nonameiguess]

With background noise? My wife and I had an interesting unintentional experiment regarding this a few weeks ago at a Slowdive concert. She doesn't know the band well and asked me the name of each song as it began and then also asked Google's song identifier service. I knew all of them and Google couldn't even produce an answer, incorrect or not. Either because of the crowd noise or a live version is sufficiently different from any recorded example it has heard before.

[steelbrain]

> or a live version is sufficiently different from any recorded example it has heard before

Probably this.

[jgalt212]

Yes with background noise, but I have never attempted with live music.