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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Interfaces

Apple App Clips is Out Today, Right in the Middle of the Contactless HeyDay

Apple’s iOS 14 drops today, which means a bunch of new features are coming to your iPhone. Among the batch of goodies to be found in the update is the release of App Clips, which could help accelerate the adoption of mobile contactless payments across the food retail and restaurant space.

We covered App Clips back when the service was announced at Apple’s WWDC event. In a nutshell, App Clips allows you to pull down just a portion of a native mobile app to give you its basic functionality, without needing to download and set up the full app.

Let’s say, for example, you are at a Starbucks but don’t have the Starbucks app installed on your iPhone. Normally, you’d have to download the full app, set up an account and then enter a payment method before you could even start your order. Through App Clips, you can grab just enough of the Starbucks app to order and pay. No need to download the full app, no need for an account and since it uses Apple Pay, no need to enter credit card information.

The big limitation right now is that a cafe, restaurant or retailer has to be participating the program and developed an App Clip. But if/when they do, App Clips can be opened by scanning QR codes, tapping NFC tags, or opening links via Apple services like Messages or Safari. For a full run down of how App Clips works, check out this post from 9 to 5 Mac.

App Clips is definitely arriving at the right time. The COVID-19 pandemic’s sustained presence here in the U.S. is pushing cafes, restaurants and grocery stores towards more contactless payment systems in an attempt to reduce human-to-human contact.

There are a ton of companies bringing contactless payment tech to market. Order for Me, PayJunction and Bbot are among the many startups building contactless payment systems for restaurants. Kroger launched a contactless payment pilot at its QFC store in Seattle last month. And there are a number of other companies doing contactless 2.0, basically through holograms, voice control and pay with your face.

The difference with App Clips, though, is Apple’s massive iPhone installed base. If this catches on, and given it’s utility (no downloading full apps just to get a cup of coffee!), that seems very possible, it could spur vast numbers of people to switch to contactless mobile payments. We just need to see if Apple has the right, well, touch.

“Alexa, Look Into My Eyes”: New Prototype Combines Human Gaze with Voice Control to Help You Cook

There’s no doubt that voice control interfaces like Alexa and Google have had a huge impact on the way we search for recipes, access our appliances and add things to our grocery lists.

But what if that voice assistant had a contextual understanding of where you where looking when you are cooking the evening meal?

That’s the big idea behind a new prototype from Synapse, a division of Cambridge Consultants. The new Hobgoblin technology concept utilizes machine vision to gather information about where a person is looking when issuing a voice command and applies that information to the cooking experience.

From the project page:

We have been exploring the use of computer-vision based sensing as context, and for this cooktop demonstration we augmented the VUI using gaze tracking to make what feels like a magical interaction. The cooktop infers which burner is being addressed in a voice command by using its camera tracking to know which burner you’re looking at. This way, when the system detects a person standing in front of it looking at a burner, commands can omit the burner designation, e.g. “turn that burner on,” or simply saying a level like “medium high.”

In the concept video, a user is cooking and says “Alexa, turn up the heat.” Using a camera that is built into the cooktop, Alexa is able to infer that the user is cooking because they are looking at the cooktop.

There’s no doubt that the ability to combine contextual understanding of what is happening in a room to power commands given to digital assistants like Alexa could create much more powerful potential “smart kitchen” user scenarios. One could easily imagine combining other information to create more contextually relevant experiences, including facial recognition to, for example, apply a personalized knowledge base that understands a person’s cooking capabilities or their favorite recipes.

You can see the Hobgoblin demo in action below:

Hobgoblin Smart Appliance Interface | This New User-Interface Tech Isn't Just for the Kitchen

As Menus Move to Mobile Phones, Research Shows AR Could Drive More Sales

Among the countless ways COVID is altering the meal journey is the humble menu. Gone are the germy, reusable laminated menus of the past, and while single-use paper menus are a cheap stopgap, the whole experience will move to our mobile phones.

There’s a problem with ordering through mobile menus, though: they aren’t very enticing. Unless you’re familiar with the restaurant you’re ordering from, you’re scrolling and swiping through a lengthy list of tiny 2D thumbnail images to find what you want.

But new research out of Oxford University shows that augmented reality (AR) could be the way to create appetizing menus on your mobile phone. Oxford’s study, conducted in Oxford, England last year in partnership with the AR company Qreal, a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group, gave some participants traditional menus and others AR-capable menus that presented the virtual food as it would look right in front of them on the table.

Highlights from the study, which were emailed to The Spoon, found that “Participants were significantly more likely to order a dessert if they viewed options in the AR menu (41.2%) versus the control menu (18%).” This was across age groups and sexes, as well as across familiarity with AR, so it wasn’t just tech-savvy folk indulging in a shiny new toy.

Not only that, but participants in the study using the AR menu also “spent significantly more on dessert than those in the control condition, $2.93 versus $1.38 (increase of 112%)”

As Mike Cadoux, General Manager of Qreal, summed it up with me over the phone last week, the addition of AR plays into the old adage that you “eat with your eyes first.”

“It’s like a test drive for a car,” said Cadoux, “Same way when you buy food, you want to think about what it’s like to eat it.”

If the results of this study had been released even six months ago, it probably would have been viewed as more of an interesting idea. A nice-to-have kind of thing, but definitely a can kicked down the road in favor of something more pressing.

The coronavirus, however, could accelerate AR’s adoption in the restaurant industry. First, as noted, even if you can (legally and emotionally) to sit and dine in a restaurant, the menu is moving towards mobile, so restaurants need to rethink their digital strategy and how they present their food to customers to begin with.

But more pressing is the fact that the restaurant business was already moving towards off-premises eating before the pandemic and now relies on delivery and takeout to stay alive. This, in turn means that more people will be selecting their meals from the comfort of their couch via mobile phone.

“Instead of a thumbnail of a picture,” Cadoux said, “You can view it in 3D and move it to an AR experience.” AR gives customers a better sense of what the food will look like, from all angles, when it’s on their own plates on and tables.

In addition to restaurants, third-party delivery services, with their marketplaces and massive audiences, should also be looking closely at providing an AR option.

There are the economics of a shift to an AR menu for any restaurant of delivery service to consider. But thanks to Apple and Google, AR technology is easier than ever to implement. And while the Oxford study doesn’t prove outright that implementing AR menus will guarantee increased sales, the study is a nice data point that seems to indicate it’s worth at least experimenting with it.

Bevi Will Socially Distance Its Smart Water Coolers With Touchless Tech

As restaurants reopen and (some) employees go back to the office, ensuring sanitary, socially distanced public spaces is a major topic of discussion, and contactless is fast becoming a requirement for everything from restaurant menus to grocery deliveries to lunch.

Your office water cooler can join that list now, too. Today, Bevi, a tech company that makes smart water coolers for office and commercial spaces, announced a new touchless dispensing feature meant to make it machines feel more sanitized and socially distanced to users.

The Bevi machine dispenses both still and sparkling water in a variety of flavors. The system involves an internet-connected dispenser that hooks up to a tap water source. Up to now, users could set flavors, carbonation levels, and other preferences using a touchscreen built into the machine. But come July 13, both new and existing Bevi machines will offer touchless dispensing that utilizes an individual’s mobile phone, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Come July 13, Bevi will send an on-screen animation to all its machines that includes instructions on how to use touchless dispensing. To enable the animation, companies just have to run a simple software update. From there, users can scan a QR code, which will replicate Bevi’s dispensing menu on their own personal screen. The same options for drink customization (carbonation levels, flavor, etc.) will appear on the user’s phone just as they would have on the machine’s touchscreen.

On the surface, the update seems a small one, but actually, these micro innovations from the tech world play an important role in making the world, or at least your office or local restaurant, a more sanitary place. While the scale of germophobism varies from one individual to the next, the pandemic has definitely called into question our use of these screens in public settings.

Various efforts are in place to address those concerns. Restaurants across the world are being urged to adopt contactless menus. My colleague Chris Albrecht makes a good argument for gesture control on kiosks and smart dispensers. Others are releasing facial recognition technology on their machines, so that a user need only have their face scanned to access the customer profiles and past orders. 

But facial recognition systems are expensive and come with a double side of privacy concerns. In lots of cases, it may be that a simple QR code is more feasible for a business to implement, especially if it’s for something simple like dispensing a lime-flavored water.

That seems to be Bevi’s thinking behind its new feature update. Doubtless we’ll see many other device-makers rolling out their own touchless functionality in the near future.

Now is the Time to Add Gesture Control to Self-Serve Kiosks

Self-serve kiosks could be one bit of technology used to help restaurants re-open. Switching to kiosks can help eliminate ordering from a worker behind a counter and thereby reducing human-to-human contact.

But the problem with a lot of kiosks is that they still require people to use a touchscreen when it comes to browsing a menu and ordering food. Those touchscreens are, well, touched by a lot of hands throughout the day. This will mean that restaurants will need to not only clean the screens on a regular basis, but make sure those sanitation efforts are on display so customers know the kiosks are clean.

One feature that could help mitigate any concerns over using public kiosks is gesture tech — that is, the ability to wave and swipe your hands in front of a device without actually touching it to activate it.

More than just waving your hand under a faucet to get it to run, gesture controls have been around for a long time. Check out this demo of gesture control via Kinect on the Microsoft Xbox from 2014. It shows how you can scroll and select on-screen objects with your hand while never actually touching the screen. My recollection of using the system back then was that it was pretty clunky, but advancements in computing power, computer vision and even AI have assuredly resolved those issues.

You can start to see some of this contactless tech with PopID, which makes kiosks that let you pay with your face. Obviously, as with any facial recognition, there are privacy concerns. But, rightly or wrongly, those more abstract concerns could get set aside because people who don’t want to physically interact with a public machine and insert their credit card.

Obviously, an easier solution would be to skip the kiosk altogether and just have people use their phone to order. In that way, the only object they touch is their own. That is true, but not everybody has a smartphone. Also, while people may download apps for big companies they frequent like Starbucks or McDonald’s, they won’t download an app for every single restaurant they visit. Plus, mobile apps are expensive to build and not every mom and pop restaurant can afford to make them.

We are just starting to figure out what people want from restaurant interactions. Perhaps they will be fine with ordering from an actual person wearing a mask and all of this is for naught. But if the virus doesn’t go away or rebounds in a meaningful way, we could all be waving hello to gesture controlled kiosks.

Here’s Your Handy CES 2020 Food and Kitchen Tech Preview & Walking Guide

Heading to CES?

Make sure to wear comfortable shoes, bring some Tylenol, and get ready for lots of food and cooking tech!

Having gone to the world’s biggest consumer tech show for well over a decade, I’ve gotten pretty good at finding new products that are of interest to me. That said, even for someone like myself who’s spent more than his fair share of shoe leather getting around the ugly carpets of Vegas, finding the latest in food tech has always been something of a challenge at a show where entertainment, robotics and car tech news usually steal most of the headlines.

The good news is that all started to change last year with the debut of Impossible Burger 2.0, and, based on my pre-show planning over the past couple of weeks, I expect to see a whole bunch of food and kitchen tech news at this year’s CES.

I figured I’d share some of my research by putting together a guide to what’s going on in food tech and smart kitchen at CES 2020 to help you make the most of your time in Vegas. I’ve even added booth numbers for most of the products to help you get there.

During the next few days, I’d also suggest you check back in here at The Spoon for stories, videos and interviews from The Spoon editor team. And, if you plan on making foodtech news at CES with a cool product you think we should check out, drop us a note at the tip line.

So here we go! Check out these food and kitchen tech products at CES 2020:

Robot Pizza: Back in October, attendees of the Smart Kitchen Summit got to sample pizza made by the Seattle based pizza robot startup Picnic. For those of you who couldn’t make it to Seattle, now’s your chance: Picnic’s pizzabot will be serving pizza at CES. Lines for food are long at CES, and I expect the pizza-robot lines at the Las Vegas Convention Center to be even longer.

Robot Ramen: If pizza isn’t your thing, you might want to make your way over to the Taiwan Tech Area in the Sands Eureka Park (Sands 51411) to check to another Smart Kitchen Summit alumni Yo-kai Express, which will be dishing up noodles from their robot ramen vending machine.

Beerbots: You’re gonna need something to chase the pizza, so you might want to check out a beerbot like PicoBrew (Sands 41518) or stop by Treasure Island for FoodTech Live (ticket needed) to see MiniBrew or BEERMKR. Also, while I haven’t hear anything out of LG yet about their beerbot, I am waiting to see if they’ll have an update on their beer brewing appliance they debuted at last year’d CES.

Drinkbots: If you’d like something a little stiffer (I’d suggest to wait til after noon, but this is Vegas and you are an adult), try out a cocktail robot like the Drinkworks (Sands 42546 and FoodTech Live) or Bartesian (Sands 40852).

Wine Tech. Oh, so you’re a wine snob, are you? Don’t worry, you can find that too. Earlier this week Chris wrote about the Albi from Albicchiere (Sands 52722), a cool countertop appliance that stores and serves your wine. Invineo will be showing its connected wine dispenser off as well (Sands 50863).

DNA-Driven Food Choices. Food personalization is moving beyond simple suggestions, and in the future it will get downright personal by creating diet plans based on a person’s biological makeup. If you want to check out a couple of companies looking deep inside your body to make food recommendations, check out DNA Nudge (Sands Booth 44316) or Sun Genomics (FoodTech Live – ticket required for entry).

Smart Countertop Cooking. There will be an array of different countertop cooking appliances that are powered by smart software and cook in new and interesting ways. CES will be the first chance to see a working version of the long-promised Anova smart oven (see our post here), which you can see in the Sands (booth 40946) . The Julia, which is a multicooker reminiscent of the Thermomix, features guided cooking videos delivered via a touchscreen interface. You can find the Julia at in the Sands at booth 41367. Speaking of Thermomix, they’ll be showing off the TM6 at FoodTech Live (ticket required). If you’re the smoothie type, check out the cool next-gen Millo blender (Sands 40346), who will also be showing off a smart table with wireless power.

Intelligent Surface Cooking. I expect some interesting news in terms of smart cooking surfaces. One cool demo I plan to check out is the GHSP concept that is both an induction cooking surface and a touch interface (North Hall 3111). I also expect the Wireless Power Consortium to be showing off their Ki cordless kitchen platform at their usual spot in the Las Vegas Convention Center at on the walkway near the South Hall (South Hall SL-2).

Smart Home Gardening/Vertical Farming Systems. I’ve been following smart gardening systems for years at CES, but this is the first year we’ve seen big appliance brands jump in. As Jenn wrote earlier this week, LG will be showing off a new indoor gardening system at CES (Central Hall 11100). Not to be outdone, GE will be coming with its own home gardening kitchen concept called “Home Grown” which it will be showcasing at the Haier/GE booth in the central hall (Central booth 16006).

Home Food Robots. We’re not sure how fully fleshed out the Autokitch cooking robot concept is, but they’ll have a booth at CES (Sands 53034). And while it’s not quite a fully robotic kitchen concept or bread making robot, the Tigoût is a pod-based baking machine from Argentina that’s is worth checking out. Drop in a pod, out spits a souffle or a raspberry muffin. You can see the Tigoût in action at Sands 52768.

Coffee and Tea, Please. If you’re looking for a nice cup of tech-powered tea, you should check out the Teplo tea maker, which will be at the Panasonic booth in the Sands (Sands 42711). If you’re more of a coffee person, then you’re in luck if you have a ticket to FoodTech Live: A production line version of the grind and brew Spinn will make its debut after a long-anticipated wait. The Terra Kaffe – which grinds, brews and steams milk – will also be in attendance at Food Tech Live.

Alexa, Give Me a Coke. Sure, this one is kinda gimmicky, but we are talking CES after all. Amazon and Coca-Cola are teaming up for a voice-powered Amazon Alexa “Coke Energy Wall” where attendees will be able to ask Alexa for a coke and a smile (delivered via what the PR describes as a “one of Alexa’s witty responses”. You can find the Amazon Alexa Coke Energy Wall at Sands booth #40934.

Smart Fridges. Smart fridges have been debuting at CES for years, and this year they are more evolved than ever. LG will be showing off its new InstaView ThinQ refrigerator, which uses computer vision and AI for real-time inventory of what’s inside (Central Hall 11100). Samsung will be back with its latest edition of the Family Hub smart fridge line, this time powered by Whisk, a smart food AI platform they acquired in spring of 2019 (Central Hall 15006). If you’re interested in products that make existing dumb fridges smart, Smarter will be showing off its smart fridge cam platform at FoodTech Live (ticket required).

Fake Meat. Impossible stole the show last year at CES with the debut of the Impossible 2.0. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move for the fake meat unicorn to unveil their next-gen meat at CES 2019, mostly because it would be the first time most journalists and attendees would have a bite of a plant based burger. It also didn’t hurt that the 2.0 is much better than the 1.0. This year Impossible will be back, kicking things off with a press conference at 5 PM on Jan 6th and then serving up twenty five thousand free samples of Impossible Burger (I’m guessing it will be the new recipe/3.0 edition) their new pork product and the Impossible Burger at the Central Plaza of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Smart Grillin’. The Weber folks partnered up with June late last year to add some software powered cooking intelligence to their grill. You can swing by their booth at the South Hall to see what those two have cooking on the Barbie (South Hall SP-2). Also, Chris wrote up the news this weekend about Yummly’s new entry in the increasingly crowded smart thermometer space. You can check that new product if you make an appointment with Whirlpool and swing by their meeting space at the Wynn (Wynn hospitality suites). Speaking of smart thermometers, Meater is back and you can check out their latest if you have a ticket to FoodTech Live.

Tiny Adorable Dishwashers. Like many of you kitchen nerds, I’ve been excited about the Tetra. Only problem is, Heatworks, the company behind the Tetra, is a bit behind on shipping their sexy little countertop cleaning machine and so it looks like they are staying home this year and focusing on getting it out the door in 2020. But don’t worry! If you’re looking to scratch the countertop cleaning machine itch, head on over to the Daan booth to check out equally adorable Bob (Sands 50819).

Ok, that’s it. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it’s a good start. If anything really interesting pops up before tomorrow’s CES Unveiled, I’ll update the post (send me any news I’ve missed via our tip form), and for more detailed updates make sure to check back here at The Spoon all next week!

Sensory Unveils New Voice Assistant for Kitchen Appliances that Processes Commands at the Edge

Sensory, a company that creates artificial intelligence for edge computing, announced today the release of a specialized version of its TrulyNatural speech recognition platform for home appliances.

The technology can be used by appliance manufacturers to add voice control functionality to their devices. According to Sensory’s press announcement, the company’s speech processing is all done on the edge, meaning on the device itself, instead of in the cloud. In addition to not requiring the addition of a WiFi component, Sensory says this edge processing means its technology “enables a safe, secure, consistent, reliable and easy to implement experience for the end-user, free of requiring any extra apps or WIFI to be setup or operational.”

You can see Sensory’s technology in action in a microwave in the company’s promotional video.

Sensory's TrulyNatural

This makes Sensory’s voice recognition different from the Amazon voice controlled smart oven, which requires a paired Echo device in order to execute voice commands.

Additionally, Sensory says it’s edge-based approach means that appliances using its voice recognition technology are more secure and private because commands do not leave the device, nor are they ever stored. Privacy became a bigger concern for voice assistants this year, as we learned that both Amazon and Google have actual human contractors listening in on some of our conversations with these devices to better train their respective AIs. So the idea of having a “smart” device that doesn’t collect user data could be a key differentiator and selling point in the appliance market.

Sensory’s technology will be on display in the Midea microwave at the upcoming CES. TrulyNatural currently supports U.S. English, with more languages coming in the next year.

Amazon: Instant Pots, Avocados and, of course, Amazon Devices are Big Sellers This Year

In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, Amazon sent out a press release this week explaining how Amazon and Amazon devices in particular crushed it this past Cyber Monday.

In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, the company didn’t release any hard numbers, saying only that “Customers purchased millions more Amazon Devices compared to the same period last year in Amazon’s Stores globally and the best-selling items were Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.”

It’s no real surprise that the biggest e-commerce site in the world could pull levers and buttons on its biggest shopping day of the year to generate millions of sales of its own products. But if we look back, during last year’s Cyber Monday holiday weekend, Echo Dot was also a big seller, with millions of Echo devices sold. And in 2017, Amazon said that over that entire holiday shopping season that it had sold tens of millions of Alexa devices.

In short, dominance perpetuates itself, and with Amazon owning 70 percent of the smart speaker market, its dominance doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. For the smart kitchen, this means appliance makers will continue to bake Alexa capabilities into their devices, which will beget more sales of Alexa-enabled devices, and the cycle continues.

Quick sidenote: It’s interesting to see Amazon’s wording evolve over the past three years. In 2017 it was “Alexa” enabled devices. In 2018 they were “Echo” devices and this year they are “Amazon” devices. This evolution is a reflection of how Amazon has broadened its first-party offerings with items like the Fire TV devices and Ring connected doorbells and lights.

But it wasn’t all Amazon, Amazon, Amazon this holiday season. The company also announced its “Best of Prime 2019” this week and among the winners were Instant Pot and… avocados.

The Instant Pot (which merged with the maker of Pyrex earlier this year) is indefatigable. Amazon said it has been a top seller for the past three years, and the Instant Pot DUO60 was among the most gifted items by Prime members this year as well.

And while it really didn’t provide any other context or numbers, Avocados were also a big seller throughout 2019 for Amazon Prime members as well.

OK. Sure.

This is just the first round of Amazon’s “Aren’t We Great?” press releases. Expect another after Christmas as well, telling (in vague terms only) how many millions of devices it sold throughout this holiday season.

How Sevenrooms Is Making Voice Tech the Centerpiece of Restaurant Operations

If you are a restaurant in 2019, one of your most valuable assets is your customer data: what they order, how much they spend, whether or not they hate parsley. There are numerous tech platforms nowadays to help restaurants access this mountain of information, but historically that’s meant handling a tablet or mobile device along with all the other items restaurant staff juggle.

Guest-management platform Sevenrooms wants to change that by making it possible to access vital customer information using your voice.

The NYC-based company’s software platform already lets restaurants track customer data points in real time and access that information quickly to provide guests with more personalized service. Now the company is doubling-down on voice tech, which it believes will be the key tool for collecting and inputing customer data into restaurant systems of the future.

The company, who has raised $21.5 million to date, received an investment for an undisclosed sum from the Amazon Alexa Fund in late 2018 and has been working on an Alexa skill ever since to help restaurants access customer data faster and more seamlessly, and without having to use their hands.

“That’s a thing that would have originally required a GM to be looking down at a tablet or some form of screen,” Allison Page, Sevenrooms’ cofounder and Chief Product Officer, says over the phone of getting customer data. “And Alexa’s going to make it so much easier to get [that information] hands free in the middle of service so they don’t have to interrupt that hospitality they’re providing.”

So long as a guest’s information is stored in the restaurant’s system (via, for example, a loyalty program), Alexa can access that information with a simple voice command. For example, a GM could ask Alexa who is sitting at Table 5 and be told it’s a local customer who’s spent a total of $5,000 at the restaurant over the course of time and is celebrating an anniversary that night. The GM could then send over a giftcard, dessert or some other token of appreciation for the guest that would both personalize their experience that night and, hopefully, keep them coming back.

In certain settings, it might seem superfluous to add a voice layer to a system. But restaurants are inherently chaotic settings where multitasking reigns supreme and staff quite literally have their hands full most of the time with trays of food that could easily be spilled and damage a touchscreen device. Going hands-free with voice-enabled technology is potentially a far more seamless way of integrating guest management into a restaurant’s system. Page says the skill can also tell a user things like how much revenue a restaurant has booked that night and how that number compares to previous nights, if a guest has dietary restrictions, and even if they wrote any recent reviews of the restaurant.

The system also works the other way around. If a server or GM learns, for example, that a guest just moved to the neighborhood, they can tell Alexa to input that data into the guest’s profile to store as information for future visits.

All of this can be done without the user ever having to log into the Sevenrooms system, and that’s at the heart of Sevenrooms’ Alexa integration: bringing tech into the restaurant without letting it take over a la tablet hell.

Page demonstrated this at the 2019 NRN show by donning a pair of Alexa-enabled glasses and showing the audience how she could ask the skill questions about a restaurant guest and have the information appear right on the lens.

Whether its glasses, watches, or some other wearable device that’s the future of voice tech is yet to be determined. While voice tech in the restaurant has gotten a lot of press lately thanks to McDonald’s acquisition of Apprente, it’s still early days for the technology’s place in restaurants, and there are still challenges to work through. For example, Page says one of the current hurdles for Sevenrooms is getting Alexa to properly understand voice commands and questions in the middle of a noisy dining room. The company is currently working with Amazon on solving this issue.

There’s also the question of whether restaurants will sign up for yet-another piece of tech, and one they can’t even put their hands on. Page doesn’t seem terribly concerned about this, however. As she sees it, the benefits of “not having to take your eyes off the dining room and not having to take your eyes off the guest” will prove valuable enough to the customer to justify making voice tech a central part of a restaurant’s guest management system.

Amazon Echo Buds Will Tell You Where to Find Tomatoes in Whole Foods

It had been rumored that Amazon was going to announce a set of earbuds at its big media event today yesterday. But I don’t think anyone guessed that those earbuds would tell you where to find tomatoes at your local Whole Foods.

The Amazon Echo Buds let you wirelessly listen to music and take calls, and also feature noise reduction and hand-free access to Alexa (they also work with Siri and Google Assistant). The Echo Buds are available for pre-order today for $129 and will be available at the end of next month.

Normally we wouldn’t write about earbuds, but during the demo on-stage yesterday, Amazon showed the Echo Buds doing two food techy things: First they were used to find out if a local Whole Foods had canned tomatoes in stock, and then they showed us how Alexa can tell you where those tomatoes are inside the store (e.g. “aisle 6”).

Aside from being neat — and useful — it also points to how Amazon is folding Whole Foods more directly into its other products, and how Alexa is getting more contextual. The device is no longer just handing out information but providing real-world guidance on a granular level. You can imagine Alexa not just guiding you to one item, but if you tell it that you are making lasagne, the Echo Buds could guide you through a store, giving you the fastest route to pick up all the necessary ingredients.

Of course, this guidance only applies to Whole Foods at the moment, so you’re out of luck if you shop at Kroger or Albertsons. And even then, the in-store location within Whole Foods is limited because for now, you have to select a Whole Foods location that Alexa then taps into. So you can’t wander into any Whole Foods to get guidance, you have to be in the one you picked.

Still, we know that Amazon has been experimenting with Amazon Go store-like cashierless checkout technology at bigger stores. That system involves lots of cameras and computer vision, so it’s aware of inventory levels and product placement in-stores. If Amazon rolls that system out to all of its Whole Foods, Alexa will be able to “see” into those stores to provide more precise location information (“halfway down aisle 6, top shelf”).

That’s still a ways away but listen up, with the Echo Buds, Alexa is coming with you, wherever you are.

McDonald’s Acquires Voice Ordering Tech Startup Apprente, Will Form New Tech Lab

McDonald’s announced today that it will acquire Apprente to bolster the fast food giants voice-based ordering capabilities. This is the second tech startup acquisition for Mickey D’s this year, and the Apprente team will form the basis of a new tech lab for the chain.

In the press announcement, McDonald’s described Apprente and how it will use the startup’s technology:

Apprente was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California, to create voice-based platforms for complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering. In McDonald’s restaurants, this technology is expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at the Drive Thru with future potential to incorporate into mobile ordering and kiosks.

The Apprente acquisition is part of McDonald’s ongoing evolution into more of a tech company. Back in March of this year, McDonald’s acquired personalization platform Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make its menus more Netflix-y with recommendations based on factors like the weather or current purchases. That technology is now deployed into more than 8.000 McDonald’s locations. Additionally, the chain was reported in June that McDonald’s was experimenting with robot-powered deep fryers and voice-activated technology at its drive thrus.

Major QSRs see over half their orders come via the drive thru, so it’s no surprise that area of fast food is a hotbed of tech activity. Both Clinc and Valyant AI are working on their own voice-tech solutions, and 5thru uses AI to that involves scanning a customer’s license plate. And while McDonald’s has certainly made the biggest strides of all QSRs in terms of adding tech to the drive-thru experience, others, including KFC and Dunkin’, are also experimenting with ways to speed up order times and upsell more customers.

Seeing this type of competition is most likely spurring McDonald’s decision to ramp up its own tech efforts internally. As such, the company also announced today that the Apprente team will be the founding member of a new group within McDonald’s Global Technology team called the McD Tech Labs based in Silicon Valley. The new lab will be going on a hiring spree to bring on engineers, data scientists and other technology related positions.

Domino’s Supreme Court Petition Highlights a Growing Problem in Restaurant Tech

Increasingly, Domino’s is seen as a company striving to get pizzas anywhere at any time and to anyone. But that apparently doesn’t include the blind.

In the last year alone, the company has made many advancements when it comes to finding easier, faster ways to get the pie to customers, from autonomous delivery to testing in-vehicle ordering and delivering to non-traditional addresses via location services technology.

But an article published this week on Eater noted that Domino’s is “willing to go to the Supreme Court” in order to fight a ruling that would require the pizza-tech heavyweight to make its website accessible to the blind.

As the article explains, California resident Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed a lawsuit against Domino’s after two failed attempts to order a customized pizza from the Domino’s website and mobile app, arguing that protections under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) apply to brick-and-mortar businesses’ online properties, too. But after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Robles in January, Domino’s is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Robles case, arguing that the Federal government hasn’t yet issued rules for businesses on how to make their websites (and mobile apps and other digital properties) ADA compliant.

Eater has the full breakdown of the case’s details, and also highlights the rise in lawsuits (what Domino’s suggested was a “flood of litigation” in its petition) against websites for failing to account for those with disabilities.

In the case of Domino’s part of the issue is litigation: In its petition, Domino’s wrote that, “Left undisturbed, the Ninth Circuit’s decision would turn that flood of litigation into a tsunami” and that the Supreme Court’s review “is imperative to stem a burdensome litigation epidemic.”

But getting buried in legal fees or no, it highlights an important point that, while Domino’s is definitely a part of it, is much, much bigger than a single pizza chain: this brave new restaurant world of digital-first ordering, AI-powered recommendations, drive-thrus of the future, and any number of other developments in the restaurant industry need to work harder at making their solutions available to not just most people but to all people.

We’ve seen this issue of inclusivity surface around other areas of food tech, most recently with the discriminatory nature of cashless payments towards underbanked and unbanked populations. And we’ve seen how the answers aren’t always simple, as the debate over providing plastic straws to persons with disabilities suggests.

Now what we need to see is more people — tech companies, delivery services, the restaurants themselves, acknowledging this growing problem of inclusivity and refocusing some of their energy around all this so-called innovation. As a leader in both the restaurant industry and restaurant tech sector, Domino’s — and other major chains — should be setting an example for other smaller companies and showing them how to use tech to the benefit of everyone, rather than spending their time petitioning the Federal government. They may be trying to stem “burdensome litigation” right now, but they’ll be trying to stem a lot of bad press and lost business in the future.