Red Lobster and Captain D’s Dive Into Voice AI as Restaurants Race to Automate Orders |

Two seafood chains dare to jump into artificial intelligence. Red Lobster and Captain D announced this week that they would like to use KI orders, Red Lobster by phone and captain D during the passage. They are the latest brands that test automation to improve efficiency and increase sales and to underline both the promise and the unsolved questions about the KI of the restaurant voice.

Red Lobster, who is still working on stabilizing his business after bankruptcy, works with Soundhound to automate his telephone lines over around 500 locations. The system is trained on the occasional chain menu, can edit orders and answer customer questions and is always available, even if the employees are too busy to pick up. The chain says that customers can still apply to be transferred to a person if they prefer it. In addition to the convenience factor, the move signals how critical sales outside the Premise have become casual restaurants. Calls that once sound unanswered now represent sources of income to leave chance.

Captain DS S starts Presto Phoenix to edit Drive-Thru orders at its 525 locations. The system not only takes orders, but also trudges the guests with uppsells and ultimately on registration requests for loyalty. At the FSTEC conference, Cio Sean McANally said that AI's ability to consistently increase loyalty registrations and to recognize regular customers for personalized offers. Theoretically, this means that a Drive Thru interaction from a transaction could develop into a targeted marketing touchpoint.

These announcements come because Voice -ai's adoption in restaurants enters a second, more serious wave. Early pilots of giants like McDonald's showed how quickly the accuracy problems could derail ambitious projects. Many customers, especially older demographic data, were eliminated by robot or error-prone interactions. This reality was recognized by FSTEC, where Long John Silver found that his core guests often did not like language automation. However, supporters argue that the upward trend is too great to ignore: faster throughput, consistent uppseling and work savings at a time when the edges are thin.

Here are newer participants VOX AI make your case. The startup based in Amsterdam has just raised 8.7 million US dollars of seed financingIn order to bring its total amount to $ 10 million to expand its autonomous language platform, which was specially developed for quick service restaurants. In contrast to previous systems that were adapted by general voice assistants, VOX AI was rebuilt from scratch to sound, chaotic passages. His training pipeline reproduces the natural cadence and plays optimized on site and learns local accents, slang and even acoustic quirks. The company claims that autonomy on a scale without the need for human supervision and supports more than 90 languages ​​- all, while it is connected directly to existing POS systems without new hardware. The field is difficult to ignore for the operators: up to 17 -x Roi through shorter queues, higher upsells and conversions.

The competitive landscape is overcrowded. Conversation, KeaPresent SoundhoundPresent Presto and newer players like Loman AiWhat has closed in the last month a 3.5 million US dollars financing roundCarve niches in telephone, drive-throat or multi-channel order. Some concentrate briefly, like Loman with telephone order, while others position the voice as the primary interface for the QSR sector of the Billion dollar. What distinguishes VOX AI is the strategy and the right to real autonomy through the Drive Thrust. If you have this noisy modeling and multilingual liquids, the problems that do previous efforts to fail will overcome.

For Red Lobster and Captain DS, their latest movements are incremental compared to Vox AIS Kühnerer Vision. But together these stories reflect the same reality: restaurants cannot afford to slip the customers in a missed call or a long passage line. Voice AI becomes not only a technical experiment, but also an operational tool on the front. The operations are high. If this new generation of solutions can finally reconcile accuracy, guest acceptance and measurable ROI, the way in which customers order seafood or anything else can be changed. If not, the operators risk the risk of sinking more resources into technology that ultimately rejects guests.

Burger chains, coffee giants and fast players are exposed to the same pressure with quick services: labor costs, impatience for customers and digital competitors who increase the bar on convenience. Voice Ai promises to tackle these pain points, but the winners will be the brands that they use with precision, integrate them deep into the operation and adapt them to their unique guest base. In the next few years, it will determine whether the voice will become the standard interface for ordering food or another warning story in the long history of the restaurant industry with an over -hypter technology.