At first it was the deadly buzz of the pandemic, and now it’s the thunder of markets crashing and lightening flashing an impending recession. Will restaurant owners have no relief? Restaurants were just opening up and attending to the happy crowds as COVID ebbed, when out-of-the-blue the stock market nosedived. Complicating the state of affairs is a labor shortage in restaurants and signs for “Help Wanted’ are way to common. Given the precarious climate, owners cannot pay their employees high wages as profit margins have been squeezed for many restaurants. What do they do?

Voice Technology Helps Ease the Shortage

Voice automation is a cost-effective solution with long-term benefits. It creates back-end operational efficiency and lends a hand in front-end ordering, easing any lack of available labor. You can easily give back an hour to each employee with an intelligent voice assistant.

Backend Operational Efficiencies

A. Tasks: The voice assistant is a hands-free buddy who reminds an employee to login, enter work schedules, complete tasks, adhere to special instructions etc. When the employee finishes a task, he can just inform the voice assistant and the app will automatically check off the task. No need to take off gloves to touch and type task fulfillment in apps. And nothing beats a friendly voice prompt to remind employees to complete tasks in a timely manner. Operational efficiencies = cost savings. It is estimated that approximately 5 seconds are shaved off per task by using an intelligent voice assistant.

B. Order Fulfillment

Modern kitchens have Kitchen-Display-Systems with screens that can bring up orders according to priority, highlight special dietary requests, flag ad hoc changes, and showcase item inventory. With voice technology, the employee no longer needs to take out time to read the screen or re-engage with it while he steps away to get something- as it audibly prompts the employee for order fulfillment. The employee can ask questions and get intelligent and accurate responses if he did not understand the prompt. The hands-free voice assistant enables every restaurant employee to save approximately 10 seconds per order fulfillment.

Front-end Operational Efficiencies

Adding voice tech to restaurant food ordering mobile or web apps save precious employee time in taking the order, ensuring accuracy of order, getting payment etc. The customer orders on an app and can either get the food delivered at home or the office or can pick-up from the restaurant premises. Lengthy menus and frequent changes to the restaurant food items are common, making voice user interfaces faster and more desirable than using a touch screen. Instead of touch and type, swipes, and going through menu items, users can simply ask the app for their menu choice, exactly the way they want it, and get their items ordered in a few seconds, thus increasing their satisfaction.

A touchless restaurant kiosk facilitate a self-service, unhurried experience, and reduce the potential health risks of touch screens. Industry calculations indicate that each drive thru order is $1.56 vs one penny for a voice activated order. Kiosks have the potential to significantly increase each ticket size by prompting upsells and cross-sells, and making personalized menu recommendations based on historical buyer behavior.

Additional Benefits

Besides resolving the labor shortage and operational costs, voice technology can reduce food wastage and makes for quicker, superior customer service.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your restaurant app, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver exactly that. Email us at sales@alan.app

Alan AI has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.