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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Valyant AI

ConverseNow Acquires Drive-Thru Voice AI Specialist Valyant AI

Today, ConverseNow announced that it has acquired drive-thru conversational AI specialist Valyant AI. According to the announcement about the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – the entire Valyant AI team will be retained post-acquisition.

Until now, ConverseNow has largely succeeded in winning restaurant chain business through call center voice automation. With this deal, ConverseNow brings a drive-thru AI specialist into the fold, jumpstarting its efforts to penetrate the growing market for AI-voice-assisted drive-thru technology.

Valyant AI, which started quickly out of the gate in 2019 with a win at a Techcrunch automation and AI pitch competition in 2019, has since run trials with its Holly voice AI at CKE and Checkers. The company’s technology, which is differentiated from ConverseNow’s in that the AI runs locally on proprietary hardware (ConverseNow’s AI runs in the cloud), also includes a generative AI training application called AI Employee Assist, which restaurant staff can ask questions and receive instant responses. According to the announcement, the Valyant AI technology will be integrated into both the drive-thru and tables by the end of Q3.

The deal is another signal that the restaurant voice AI and automation is heating up. Other providers, such as Presto and Soundhound, have been growing their installed base for both phone and drive-thru automation solutions, while large chains like Wendy’s have been developing their own voice AI technology. McDonald’s, which had been running a trial of voice assistant powered by IBM, recently announced they were sunsetting the initiative and would evaluate other voice AI technologies and select another solution by the year’s end.

Beyond the obvious employee cost-saving benefits of voice automation, QSRs also see opportunities to increase total order size through upselling capabilities. According to ConverseNow, its technology can detect conversational nuances and personalize orders based on contextual data and information gained in real time during the order process.

KFC Hints at AI, License Plate Recognition for Drive-thrus

KFC is exploring technology that would automate the process of ordering and upselling items in the drive-thru, according to an interview the chain’s U.S. Chief Technology Officer Christopher Caldwell did with Nation’s Restaurant News this week. KFC’s strategy looks to be focused on AI technology similar to that of McDonald’s, whose digital menu boards speed up ordering and automatically recommend items to customers.

The news comes on the heels of KFC’s little-publicized launch of an in-house online ordering platform, which happened earlier in October and is clearly part of a larger push from the Louisville, KY chain to increase efforts around the digital restaurant experience.

While Caldwell said the new native online ordering platform is “exceeding expectations” in terms of customer response, improving and innovating on the drive-thru is crucial for KFC.

That’s hardly surprising. Speed of service at the drive-thru in general has steadily gone down over the last decade, with the average time in 2019 a good 20 seconds longer than the previous year. But drive-thrus still account for a huge percentage of sales at QSR chains. For KFC, they account for about 65 percent of sales, according to Caldwell. Using automation in the drive through could potentially minimize both mistakes that happen during the order-taking process in the drive-thru as well as the length of time a customer spends waiting.

Caldwell also said drive-thru technology could bump up check averages thanks to better personalization and suggestive selling — one of the key benefits McDonald’s has been touting with the Dynamic Yield AI technology it’s rolled out to thousands of drive-thrus of late. He also hinted at license-plate recognition in the future, where the system can scan a customer’s plate and immediately suggest that person’s favorite meal.

A number of other QSRs are now testing new technologies and methods to speed up service in the drive-thru. Chains like Dunkin’, Krispy Kreme, and Chipotle are adding lanes for mobile-only orders. Sonic piloted AI-powered menu boards earlier this year. Meanwhile, companies like 5thru and Valyant AI are partnering with QSRs to automate more of the process through AI.

KFC hasn’t actually deployed any of this technology to actual stores yet, though Caldwell told NRN that “there’s going to be no shortage of [KFC] franchisees that want to adopt and be a test partner” when that finally happens.

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.