An intelligent voice assistant can be a boon for increasing restaurant employee productivity and scaling operational efficiency, ensuring food safety compliance, and increasing order ticket sizes.

A heartening statistic mentions how customers are open to using voice for ordering food- 64% of Americans are interested in ordering food with the help of voice user interfaces and more than one quarter of all USA consumers who own voice activated devices have used them to order food service. Recently, Opus Research published a research report ‘The Business Value of Customized Voice Assistants’ based on a global survey of 320 business leaders in 8 industries to obtain the state of voice assistant implementation and global trendsthat recognizes that restaurateurs are rapidly realizing the benefits of voice assistants for accurate, efficient food ordering.

Voice assistants have come a long way from consumer voice experiences with products like Alexa smart speakers, Google Assistant, and Siri. Interactive, AI powered voice for business apps are inside your app and drive context-aware conversations. Using natural language, the user can navigate through the application to quickly get exactly what he wants.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech apis, text to speech, speech to text, are common technology terms tossed around as the world grapples with the rapid change from touch and type to humanlike voice interfaces for apps.

Let’s now delve into how voice assistants can be valuable to restaurant management software vendors and franchise owners.

Voice Assistants for Restaurant Management ISVs

Efficient Operational Tasks/Employee Training

A voice assistant increases efficiency and accuracy in restaurant maintenance tasks by easing the process of Real-Time Operational Reports & Notifications  The voice assistant is like a 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 screen will instantly check off the task as complete. Alan’s hands-free voice assistant enables every restaurant employee to shave off 5 seconds for any task that previously involved taking off gloves such as manual entries for work logs, task completion, etc. Each employee can get an hour back with the help of the voice driven automation and use the extra hours in their work shifts to perform higher level tasks to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Productivity gains = 5 secs per task x number of employees x daily tasks

For employee training, any new employee would be delighted to have an onboarding and self-service training help on-demand. With interactive instructions and reminders, training is easy and effective. Employees can now get trained in the shortest time possible and become productive on the job much faster.

Faster Food Order Tracking

Modern kitchens have display 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, as it audibly prompts the employee accurately for order fulfillment and 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 and make more efficient use of their time working on food order fulfilment.

                       Productivity gains = 10 secs per order x number of orders daily

Decrease in Liability for Food Safety and Hygiene Compliance

The restaurant industry has strict safety and hygiene regulations mandated by the state and federal law agencies. Restaurants have to comply with these rules to keep their doors open. Additionally, each restaurant may have their own roster of do’s and don’ts. A voice assistant can go a long way in prompting, reminding, and quickly upgrading safety and hygiene protocols for restaurant employees, and thus reducing liability.

Voice assistants increase food safety and hygiene compliance by 3X

Voice Assistants for Restaurant Franchise Owners

A Voice enabled restaurant ordering mobile device or web app and touchless restaurant kiosk facilitate a self-service, unhurried experience, and reduce the potential health risks of touch screens. Ordering food can actually be a pleasure with a friendly voice. Moreover, industry calculations indicate that each drive thru order is $1.56 vs one penny for a voice activated order. Restaurant employees also benefit from a voice assistant that can help with some of the mundane tasks while they focus on food preparation, food presentation,  and customer service.

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 voice assistant for their menu choice, the exact way they want it, and get their items ordered in a few seconds, thus decreasing customer frustration while increasing their satisfaction.

Upselling to the customer is also easier with a voice interface.  Consider this scenario: A customer orders a burger at a kiosk. Alan’s voice assistant asks “would you like to add a side of fries for $2.00?”. A personalized, humanlike voice influences the customer to reach a faster decision and more likely a “Yes”- they may have an interest in the item but did not happen to notice it in the menu or did not have the time to look through the entire menu.

A Forbes article mentions that average ticket size increased by 20–40%  when voice assistants were used to place a food order. Therefore, an order for $10 can very easily be converted to $12 or $14 with interactive voice apps.

Wrapping it up, Voice Interfaces which interact with customers like normal conversations for food ordering, operations, and delivery are fast becoming a norm in the restaurant industry. The need for a hands-free, touchless application has gained popularity with the onset of the COVID pandemic.

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. Write to us at sales@alan.app

Alan 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.