Friday , March 29, 2024

Working With Toast, SoundHound Enables Voice Ordering Over the Phone for Restaurants

Toast Inc. has partnered with SoundHound AI Inc. to add voice ordering over the phone to its point-of-sale system. The addition of SoundHound’s voice-ordering software will enable restaurants using Toast’s POS system to accept voice orders over the phone and transmit the order directly to Toast’s platform.

This integration, which is expected to give Toast another point of differentiation in the highly competitive restaurant POS arena, can increase the number of orders a restaurant can take, as well as automatically provide answers to simple questions consumers may have about the restaurant, such as business hours, location, and directions, SoundHound says.

As part of the integration to the Toast platform, SoundHound’s voice technology connects to a restaurant’s menu to enable ordering. Artificial intelligence enables SoundHound’s application to stay abreast of menu changes in real time, such as the addition of new items or the unavailability of a listed item. Once the order is completed, it is pushed into the Toast POS system and a payment link is texted to the customer. The automated ordering process enables servers to focus on serving dine-in or takeout customers as the order is prepared, SoundHound says.

SoundHound’s software uses patented voice-based artificial intelligence that can understand natural human speech. As a result, consumers don’t have to modify their language to interact with the software, the company says. They can just speak as they would to another person. The application can be deployed by any restaurant to take food and drink orders over the phone, via menu kiosks or at the drive-thru.

“Customers expect a high level of customer service, and restaurants are simply overburdened and understaffed. This often results in protracted hold times for customers,” Mike Lauricella, head of channel partnerships at SoundHound, tells Digital Transactions News by email. “If the customer does need to speak with someone, we can send them to our call center or connect them to the [restaurant]. It’s all about getting the customer what they need as quickly as possible.”

SoundHound’s voice technology also enables restaurants to process more orders, the company says. “It takes time for restaurants to answer the phone and often these calls go to voicemail, and are typically lost,” says Lauricella. “This results in a loss of revenue and a negative customer experience.”

Toast, which has carved out a strong presence in the restaurant POS market, has more than 180 integration partners and more than 80,000 restaurants using its POS system.

Looking ahead SoundHound plans to integrate its Dynamic Interaction app into Toast’s kiosk and drive-thru solutions. Dynamic Interaction uses fragment parsing, which breaks speech down to partial utterances and processes them in real-time, and full-duplex audio-visual integration to ensure order accuracy. As a result, consumers don’t have to speak in a slow or unnatural way to be understood by the application, the company says. They can also receive instant responses and customize and edit a food order during the ordering process.

SoundHound also plans to partner with other major payments providers in the restaurant market, such as Shift4 Payments Inc., Lauricella adds.

“Our goal is to power the order experience across phone, kiosk, drive thru, app, text, and Web,” Lauricella says.

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