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Starbucks To Roll Out Microsoft Azure OpenAI Assistant For Baristas

3 months ago
Starbucks is piloting a generative AI assistant called "Green Dot Assist" to streamline barista tasks and improve service speed, with plans for a broader rollout in fiscal 2026. The assistant is built on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI platform. CNBC reports: Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks' intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language. As the AI assistant evolves, Starbucks has even bigger plans for its next generation. Those ideas include automatically creating a ticket with IT for equipment issues or generating suggestions for a substitute when a barista calls out of work, according to [Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre]. [...] Lefevre said tenured baristas have been learning to use the new POS in as little as an hour. Plus, the technology can offer personalized recommendations and loyal customers' repeat orders, helping Starbucks achieve the personalized touch it's looking to bring back to its cafes. "It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we're doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Lefevre told CNBC.

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Android 16 Is Here

3 months ago
An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Google: Today, we're bringing you Android 16, rolling out first to supported Pixel devices with more phone brands to come later this year. This is the earliest Android has launched a major release in the last few years, which ensures you get the latest updates as soon as possible on your devices. Android 16 lays the foundation for our new Material 3 Expressive design, with features that make Android more accessible and easy to use.

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Bluesky's Decline Stems From Never Hearing From the Other Side

3 months ago
Bluesky's user engagement has fallen roughly 50% since peaking in mid-November, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, as progressive groups' efforts to migrate users from Elon Musk's X platform show signs of failure. The research found that while many news influencers maintain Bluesky accounts, two-thirds post irregularly compared to more than 80% who still post daily to X. A Washington Post columnist tries to make sense of it: The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it's hard to get positive engagement unless you're saying things progressives want to hear -- and where the negative engagement on things they don't want to hear can be intense. That's true even for content that isn't obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he'll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too "fraught." All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren't already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.

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