Life
How To Order Taco Bell Over Slack Chat
It's been proven: The robots are here, and they want us to have Taco Bell. The new Taco Bell Slack bot, TacoBot, can help you with everything from recommendations to placing an order. So, you know, whatever technological nightmares the future holds, it seems there will be Taco Ball.
The bot, fittingly named TacoBot, operates in the messaging service Slack, and it's designed to make ordering Taco Bell quick and painless. Simply message the bot through the app, and it will answer your questions and tally up your order. You can then pay TacoBot directly and head over to your local Taco Bell to pick up your order — or at least you'll eventually be able to do that, once the service launches sometime in the next few months. It's the sort of thing that's ideally suited to placing large orders, like for a group of friends or coworkers, and it sounds delicious.
"The TacoBot Slack integration is the latest step on our journey to make the brand more accessible wherever and whenever our fans want it," Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation and on demand, said in a statement. "Taco Bell is about food tailor-made for social consumption with friends, and that’s why integrating with a social communications platform like Slack makes perfect sense. TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler… and who wouldn’t want that?"
Apart from potentially revolutionizing the office lunch order, there are also some fairly big picture questions that come with this development. Is this the future of fast food? Did humans really invent artificial intelligence just to use it to obtain more Taco Bell? Will our artificially intelligent creations eventually tire of helping us get Doritos Locos Tacos and quesadillas and rebel against us? Do we really think we can subject the computers to the horrors of dealing with the general public and not have them want to annihilate us all? Is now really the time to provoke them?
But in all seriousness, though, the fact that we can now use chatbots to order Taco Bell is one of those things that you never would have been able to explain to someone from the 1990s; Smarter Child could do many things, but provide us with burritos was not one of them. We are truly living in the future, guys. And it's full of meat and cheese.
