Say hello to the animatronic Colonel Sanders head that speaks in the voice of the Colonel and is designed to physically pop up and take your order at a KFC drive-thru.

In connection with National Fried Chicken Day, (Thursday 6th July), 'H.A.R.L.A.N.D. (short for Human Assisted Robotic Linguistic Animatronic Networked Device)' was revealed.'The bot itself, and the whole concept of an animatronic order-taking Colonel, are clearly a little goofy. And so agency, Wieden+Kenney leaned into that with its messaging around it, including a Funny Or Die video, which is more of a mockumentary than anything:'*

'But while the angle is comical, it’s a serious project for W+K, as the agency continues to experiment with cutting-edge technologies like voice recognition, AI and bots and how they might be leveraged in brand work. Part of the challenge is to get the tech applications to align with the tone of the existing brand storytelling, which this KFC work does. The tech here is pretty impressive, too, as H.A.R.L.A.N.D. takes the words of an actual human KFC order taker and translates them into Harland-speak with little delay.'*
How much fun and how amazing would it be if this technology was replicated across multiple brands and drive-thrus. You often drive-thru and the servers are having to multi-task with so many different little jobs. H.A.R.L.A.N.D would be able to help and therefore give the servers less to worry and stress about and probably be able to smile a bit more whilst doing the job. 
People might worry about robots taking over human roles and that is a fair argument, but surely this is something that will work in parallel and I love it.

*http://www.adweek.com/creativity/kfc-made-a-weird-animatronic-harland-sanders-robot-to-take-your-drive-thru-order/