Ordering using the Starbucks ChatGPT app was a real nightmare for coffee

Venti iced coffee, light skim milk. This is what I get at Starbucks. This is what I get at Starbucks every time I visit Starbucks for as long as I can remember, other than a brief love affair with Cafe Misto a few years ago. Personally, my brain barely needs to be activated to say the words out loud; In the app, it’s four clicks and I’m ready to go.

My first time ordering from Starbucks through the new ChatGPT integration, Which launched last weekit was relatively complete chaos. Getting started is easy enough, if not entirely straightforward: simply open ChatGPT and type “@Starbucks” along with your order. You can probably guess what happens next, right? I promise you are wrong. “Order me a Venti iced coffee with skim milk,” I wrote, to which ChatGPT replied: “Iced coffee is exactly what you’re looking for — it’s cold brewed and served unsweetened, so adding skim milk will keep it smooth without getting too heavy.” Great, thanks for the info ChatGPT. Please order me a coffee.

Above the message, ChatGPT added what I discovered was a list, showing the three most likely things I might have meant by “iced coffee.” Iced coffee was the first choice, victory! But I had to select “Customize,” then scroll through the pop-up UI, select the appropriate size, and add milk, otherwise when I clicked “Add to Cart,” I only got a large black iced coffee.

I should note that this actually took longer than it takes to open the Starbucks app, tap Order, tap the name of the nearest store, tap the plus sign next to the drink I always get, and then log out. But I kept going: I got the drink I wanted in the cart, then went to add my wife’s drink to my order. She calls it “fruit tea”, and it’s not a name, but it’s some kind of mysterious search that ChatGPT should handle well! I was offered lemonade and iced green tea, a reasonable but wrong guess. I finally remembered that it was Passion Tango tea, at which point ChatGPT gave me another enthusiastic description of the tea. Once again, I scrolled up, personalized, and added to cart.

At that moment, I got an ominous pop-up: “This chat is coming to an end.” I’m a free-tier ChatGPT user, but I haven’t used the app in weeks (I’m mostly a Claude guy these days), so hitting the limit so quickly was a bit surprising. Also, why is there a limit at all, when I’m trying to do something that would theoretically make both ChatGPT and Starbucks a bunch of money? To get things done as quickly as possible, I went to check it out. Turns out ChatGPT misidentified my location, displaying a list of stores within half a state of me. When I went to the map view, where ChatGPT told me I could change my location, all I got was “Oops! Something went wrong.” message. Around that time, I got another pop-up: “We’ve run out of messages with the most advanced free template.” He told me it would be reset – in five hours. Until then, I will be moved to another, less important model.

Any sane person would have given up a while ago, right? This is a terrible, straightforward ranking experience, made vastly more complicated by a back-and-forth chat system that gives a clear zero AI. But, like a good journalist, I tried again – I started over, with the aforementioned @Starbucks, and told her my order as succinctly as possible. She confirmed my order, then politely let me down. “I can’t place your order directly or add it to your actual cart,” she said, before offering to show me how to use the Starbucks app. The model I was demoted to clearly didn’t support Starbucks’ more advanced features — or I had no idea what I was just doing.

I can’t shake the idea that this app – like many AI tools – seems designed for people who don’t exist. in Starbucks special blog posthe suggests asking the app things like “Suggest a drink that matches my outfit” or “I’m in the mood for something cozy and whimsical.” Is this the way? anyone Actually decide their favorite drink? At best, these features are silly fun. At worst, it will lead to more people dreaming up ridiculous 12-ingredient, TikToked drinks that drive baristas to exhaustion all day long.

The actual dream of ordering coffee using AI has been the same for a long time: I want to say “order me coffee,” and my assistant has to know exactly what to get me and from where. The tech industry tried this in the age of Google Assistant and Alexa, and it’s trying again in the time of ChatGPT. There is a possibility that there will be really useful AI agents, like these Google is testing with Geminiit can click for you and get the job done automatically. But chat isn’t it friends. Ordering a coffee, like many things in life, is not a creative experience designed for conversation. It’s a deal. Ideally, very short, because I haven’t had my coffee yet.