McDonald’s AI Drive Thru Assistant with ChatGPT (GPT4) — JavaScript Tutorial and Starter Kit

Mate Marschalko
2 min readOct 16, 2023

McDonald’s recently made waves by investing millions into AI automation tech. I got inspired and thought: maybe I could try and build my own version of a drive-thru AI assistant taking customer orders.

Using OpenAI GPT-4 with the new Function Calling API, I wanted to see if an independent developer like me could match or excel commercial multi-million dollar projects…

McDonalds’ Drive Thru AI Assistant

Creating the Assistant

I’m sure all this sounds complicated, but the process was surprisingly easy and straightforward. To anchor my assistant and give it a matching personality, I used the McDonald’s employee handbook to extract key points, defining rules, personality traits, and responsibilities that mirror those of a McDonald’s employee.

Next, I introduced the menu items, prices, and options, borrowing data from the McDonald’s Uber Eats listing. I incorporated details about the restaurant, such as location and opening hours. Lastly, I defined the customer’s order type in the function calling definitions for the AI to use.

Here’s a quick intro and demo:

--

--

Mate Marschalko
Mate Marschalko

Written by Mate Marschalko

Senior Creative Developer, Generative AI, Electronics with over 15 years experience | JavaScript, HTML, CSS