FreshAi Transforms Drive-Throughs With AI-Driven Accessibility And Efficiency

Key Quotes

"I was working for a company in Nashville I'm just by nature a pretty curious human and I remember the first time that I typed into ChatGPT it was a really simple prompt and it was like magic I put in the sentence I think it came back with like two sentences or something this was back in early 2023 and I just remember thinking wow this is incredible I'd never experienced anything like this."

Will Croushorn describes his initial encounter with generative AI, highlighting the "magic" and unprecedented nature of the experience. This quote illustrates the profound impact of early exposure to advanced AI, sparking his curiosity and motivation to explore its potential.

"What also stood out to me was there are very few moments in human history that are this democratized I was sitting around a table with the CEO and engineers and all our data scientists and I was a product person and we were all figuring out together literally every week we'd show up and put oh I learned this or oh I tried this and there's very few moments like that where nobody knows what to do with this technology and I had the thought of I want to help lead that."

Croushorn emphasizes the democratizing effect of emerging AI technology, where diverse roles and expertise converge in a shared learning process. He expresses a desire to lead in this nascent field, driven by the unique opportunity to shape its development collaboratively.

"For us that looks like creating accessibility it looks like creating experiences but it all stems back to wow I've never experienced anything like this before what are the cool ways that we can use that."

Will Croushorn explains that the core driver behind FreshAi's development is not merely automation, but the creation of novel customer experiences and enhanced accessibility. This quote underscores his belief that AI's true value lies in enabling capabilities previously unimaginable.

"The agent's going to be able to handle it and then on screen you're going to see on a digital menu board you're going to see your order we've done a lot of research to understand how do we help guests you know looking at the cognitive load order in an easier process and so one of the ways that we do that is we actually will show you the transcript so you can see what the agent is saying you can see what you're saying and it does a couple of things it gives you a little bit of trust to know oh that it heard me correctly and then also for customers or guests that might have hearing challenges it also just gives that reassurance of I know what's happening on the screen."

Croushorn details how FreshAi enhances the drive-through experience by displaying the order on a digital screen and providing a transcript of the interaction. He explains that this feature builds trust by confirming accuracy and aids customers with hearing impairments by offering visual reassurance.

"Nobody should feel that if you pull up and you don't speak fluent English that shouldn't be a barrier so how do we widen the road and so we've done that in a couple of ways we've built FreshAi in tandem with Google Cloud and so we've worked really closely with them to train out our Spanish model."

Will Croushorn highlights FreshAi's commitment to accessibility by enabling customers to order in languages other than English, specifically mentioning the collaboration with Google Cloud to develop a Spanish language model. He articulates the goal of removing language as a barrier in the drive-through experience.

"One of the pieces of feedback was the agent is interrupting too much and because of that it feels rude and so what we did was we said all right well what's the edge case like what's the most extreme that we probably should account for well one of those is atypical speech we have something like 10 of the us population has some sort of stutter and so we said all right well can the agent handle that."

Croushorn discusses the refinement of the AI agent based on customer feedback regarding interruptions, leading to a focus on handling atypical speech patterns. He explains the proactive approach to address edge cases like stutters, aiming to create a more inclusive and polite interaction.