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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Clinc

AI Will Now Take Your Breakfast Order at the Drive-Thru

We’ve talked about AI coming to the drive-thru for some time now, and in Denver, CO, one company is finally making that happen. Valyant AI, a CO-based AI company, has set up shop at the Good Times Burger & Frozen Custard restaurant, and its AI platform is taking breakfast orders at the drive-thru.

Valyant AI’s “digital customer service representatives” aren’t all-purpose AI assistants — the company actually built the platform for the quick-service restaurant industry’s many drive-thrus. The patent-pending proprietary platform integrates directly into a restaurant’s drive-thru hardware as well as its POS system.

Better accuracy is something Valyant AI promotes heavily. According to a recent press release, the company, founded in 2017, built and taught the platform using real customer recordings from drive-thrus. And since the system was designed from the ground up for QSRs, it has a significantly smaller range of questions to contend with than a Google Assistant or Alexa. In theory, at least, that should make for more accuracy. The technology also uses the human-in-the-loop model, which is a type of AI that employs both machine and human intelligence to create learning models. So if the system can’t answer a question or fulfill a bizarre order, a human employee can intervene.

More and more, restaurant industry people are calling voice-order tech the next big thing, projecting an explosion of devices and platforms coming to market over the next year or so.

Valyant AI isn’t the first company to try serving up voice control for the drive-thru. Most notably, Clinc, who started out in the financial services sector, is expanding into the QSR realm. Since Clinc’s platform is built to treat everything it hears as data — rather than having to map back to a dictionary — it could potentially handle some of those complex drive-thru orders without the need for human intervention.

According to Valyant AI’s website, the company spent two years developing its technology. And while it’s still in beta, it seems to have launched just in time to seriously compete: 50 percent of revenue for QSR restaurants comes from the drive-thru, according to a recent study, and order accuracy is the number one concern for fast food restaurants in this area.

If Valyant AI’s Denver breakfast run is successful, we’ll probably be holding a lot more conversations with machines when it comes to the drive-thru, at breakfast and beyond.

“You Want AI with That?” Clinc Builds Conversational Voice Control for QSRs

Those long-running jokes about mangled drive-thru orders at fast food joints may become a thing of the past if Clinc delivers on its promise. The startup is building AI-powered voice controls that allow hungry humans on the go to order food in a more conversational manner.

Clinc, which has spent the past two years creating AI voice controls for financial services companies, is looking to expand into the quick-service restaurant (QSR) sector to augment the voice control capabilities of drive-thru windows and in-store ordering kiosks.

According to Dennis Zender, Vice President of Sales, Innovation & Strategy at Clinc, unlike other voice-powered AI tools on the market right now, Clinc’s AI does not rely on a tree structure or need to map back to a dictionary for its responses. This allows Clinc to treat everything said to it as data, allowing its AI to handle more complex — and messier — conversations.

If you think about your typical chatbot experience, it’s very stilted and formulaic. You say something, wait for a response, say something else, next response, and so on. Clinc promises that its AI will allow you to carry on a much more complex set of instructions. As you can see in this demo video Clinc created, the customer gives a relatively complex drive-thru order, with multiple items and special requests. He even changes his order.

Having a robust AI system in the drive-thru actually fits with the high-tech renovations many fast food chains are implementing. Long John Silvers is adding HD screens and digital audio to their drive throughs, and Caliburger lets you pay with your face at an indoor kiosk (not to mention its robot cooking burgers).

Clinc’s complex conversations are also reminiscent of Google Duplex, which is an AI that can hold eerily human-like conversations. The goal for any QSR is efficiency and speed, and automation promises to do just that. Having a reliable chatbot system that can accurately take orders and “converse” with customers would free up humans to do higher-level work. Or… ya know… eliminate them altogether. (Eep.)

Right now, Clinc is in talks with a number of QSR companies, but hasn’t rolled out anything official yet. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has roughly 100 employees and has $7.75 million in funding.

So say what you will about fast food; if Clinc clicks with chains, AI ordering is something we’ll all be chatting about.