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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

voice

Kea Raises $10M to Bring its AI-Based Phone System to More Restaurants

Kea, which makes an AI-powered virtual phone assistant for restaurants, has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report on the round, which was led by Marbruck, with Streamlined Ventures, Xfund, Heartland Ventures, DEEPCORE, Barrel Ventures and AVG Funds, as well as other angel investors participating. This brings the total amount raised by Kea to $17 million.

Basically, Kea is building an automated way for restaurants to answer the phone. The natural language processing software can hold a “conversation” with a customer to take and process their order. You can hear a demo of how it works on the Kea website.

As TechCrunch points out, many restaurants are understaffed and don’t always have a dedicated person to work the phones and take orders. During this time of off-premises eating, not answering the phone can translate into a lot of lost business. Plus, ordering directly from the restaurant instead of through a third-party like DoorDash or Uber Eats helps the restaurant avoid the sky-high commissions those services charge.

Kea is among a wave of natural language customer interaction systems coming to market. Google famously made news a couple years back with its Duplex AI-powered voice assistant for consumers to make automated restaurant reservations that sounded almost too human. Google also developed the CallJoy virtual phone assistant for small business owners. Clinc’s technology brings natural language conversations to the drive-thru, while McDonald’s acquired Apprente last year to add more voice capabilities to its drive-thru.

Kea told TechCrunch that its service is currently live in more than 250 restaurants including Papa John’s. With its new cash, the company is looking to be in 1,000 restaurants in 37 states next year.

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.

Walmart Tries to Challenge Amazon’s Grocery Supremacy through Voice Ordering

I’m not one to get excited about sporting rivalries, but I do get excited about grocery rivalries. And Amazon V. Walmart is shaking out to be the matchup of the decade.

Today Walmart made moves to challenge Amazon in the game of voice-controlled grocery ordering by announcing Walmart Voice Order. It’s a new voice-ordering capability the company is launching with Google. Starting this month, you can tell your Google Assistant (or Android or Google Smart Display) something like, “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” and then list grocery items you’d like to add to your cart. This function just keeps track of what items you want to order, though; to actually purchase them, you’ll have to give Google specific instructions to do so (though the release didn’t specify what those instructions would be).

Interestingly, Walmart actually partnered with Google Express, Google’s online shopping tool, two years ago. However, they broke off the partnership in January of this year, presumably to make way for this new voice platform.

One cool thing is that the new service will remember your frequently ordered items. So, for example, if you have a specific brand of plant-based Greek yogurt you like, you can simply say “Add yogurt to my cart” and Google will know which brand you’re talking about.

The added step of saying “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” is a little annoying, especially considering you can just say “Alexa, order yogurt” to get it directly through Whole Foods, or “Alexa, add yogurt to my shopping list” to save it for later.

The extra step of saying “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” may be a minor annoyance, but it does leave more opportunities for the voice assistant to get confused or mishear you. However, small UI nuances like that likely won’t give Walmart or Amazon an edge in the voice-ordering grocery game. Instead, it seems like the voice victor decider will come down to one thing: whether or not you have Alexa. Walmart might partner with other voice-ordering services down the road, like the Microsoft Cortana, but Alexa is likely off-limits since Amazon and Walmart compete so closely.

This could end up being a big disadvantage for Walmart simply due to Alexa’s sheer reach. Amazon owns 66 percent of the smart speaker market, according to eMarketer. And all those Alexa’s aren’t going to sell you Greek yogurt from just anywhere — they’ll push you towards Whole Foods. Which means that Amazon has a captive audience of consumers who it can easily nudge towards its own grocery purveyor, leaving Walmart out in the cold.

As of now, voice ordering still isn’t a huge sales channel for grocery. In fact, only 16 percent of Americans even order their groceries online, period. But as our world grows more connected voice technology becomes more integral in our day-to-day life, I imagine that will change. Maybe someday people will even choose to buy a Google Assistant or Alexa based off of whether they prefer shopping at Walmart or Whole Foods.

According to TechCrunch, Walmart’s Google voice shopping for in-store pickup will be offered at more than 2,100 Walmart stores and for online delivery at over 800 stores.

The Walmart news came just hours after Amazon announced a new wave of price cuts at Whole Foods in an attempt to make the natural grocery outlet more wallet friendly. By cutting costs, they’re hoping to do away with their nickname of ‘Whole Paycheck’ and attract a wider swath of consumers — including ones who tend to shop at more budget grocery chains, like, ya know, Walmart.

Richard Blais is a Big Believer in Voice Interfaces

The way we interact with our kitchens is in the midst of massive changes. Guided cooking apps are helping anyone become a better cook, screens are popping up on fridges (and elsewhere), and we can control more and more appliances in the kitchen just by talking to them.

It’s this voice control that celebrity chef Richard Blais thinks will revolutionize the kitchen. In a Q&A with Uproxx, Blais said:

So, as a big tech guy and start-up enthusiast, I think we are right here — not that we have any of this technology right now, but voice activated everything I believe is — first of all, it’s already in some homes… But I think that where the commercial restaurant or kitchen very shortly will be able to see some really amazing things happen, from the business perspective as well as the cooking execution.

If I could walk into my kitchen right now, like I can in my home, and set an oven, and a fryer and a refrigerator temperature by just saying, “Hey oven, turn on to 500 degrees and set the fryer to this and turn the lights on to this.”

We often write about voice interfaces in the home kitchen. GE’s new microwave is Alexa-enabled so you can tell it to stop or add time to your cooking. You can control LG’s SmartThinq line of cooktops ovens and fridges with Alexa or Google Home. And Kohler and Delta both have voice controlled faucets that let you dispense precise amounts of water.

These are all applications for home kitchens, however, which usually are less loud and chaotic environments than a commercial kitchen. Chef Blais would know better than I, so I wonder what tweaks would need to be made in a restaurant kitchen to accommodate for noise levels, voice recognition and lag time reduction between when a command is given and when the appliance executes it.

Thankfully, we will have a chance to ask Chef Blais in person, as he will be a speaker at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October (get your tickets now!). He’s enthusiastic about technology so the discussion with him is sure to be insightful and entertaining.

Orderscape Wants to be the Voice Layer for Ordering Food Through Alexa

There is a recurring bit in Star Trek: The Next Generation where Capt. Picard orders “Tea. Early Grey. Hot.” and the ship’s computer magically makes one appear. Though the all-knowing, all-doing computer of the Enterprise served as the inspiration for Amazon’s Alexa, right now, her food producing skills are still a bit slim.

Orderscape, a young B2B startup, is looking to change that by creating a voice ordering software layer that uses smart speakers like Alexa to let people order from restaurants just by speaking.

The goal, according to Orderscape CEO Michael Atkinson, is to connect with enough restaurants so that people at home could say “Alexa, I’m hungry for a cheeseburger.” Alexa would reply with nearby burger joints, and then allow you to pick the restaurant, customize your order (no pickles!) and complete the transaction, all just by speaking. (Orderscape only facilitates the voice order, so you’ll still need to set up an account/payment information with the appropriate vendor.)

To achieve this, Orderscape is working with platforms such as Olo, Onosys and Monkey Media — companies that already power online and mobile ordering systems for thousands of restaurants.

As Atkinson describes it, Orderscape is a plug-in that connects these ordering platforms with smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. “We built our technology stack and integrate it into Alexa using our own natural language processing engine,” said Atkinson.

That natural-language processing takes in thousands of menu items and is able to understand what a “cheeseburger” is, as well as understand the exact types of cheeses available for burgers at that restaurant. So when you talk to Alexa to order your cheeseburger, Orderscape translates your instructions for the ordering platform, who passes it through to the restaurant.

In October of last year, Orderscape announced a partnership with LevelUp. Though nothing has been fully realized from that deal yet, Atkinson says that his software is currently ingesting 22,000 menus from LevelUp, and announcements around implementations are forthcoming.

Orderscape is also working with Fazoli’s pizza chain to offer voice ordering on Alexa, you can see it in action in this video:

Orderscape is “founder funded” right now, and Atkinson says that they’ll make money by getting a small percentage of the transaction when people use voice to place an order. Additionally, by acting as the middleman in the transaction, Orderscape will amass a lot of customer data that it can use to better understand and presumably monetize.

Partnering with aggregators like LevelUp is a smart play for the startup, as it puts Orderscape in front of more potential customers quickly and becomes a value add for the ordering platform.

I’m not convinced, however, that straight voice is the best mechanism for ordering food, especially when ordering multiple, complex items. Voice would be more powerful when paired with a visual element like the touchscreen on the Echo Show, so I could scroll through all the options available, see what I’m ordering and exactly how much I’m paying.

Since Alexa is built into devices like the FireTV that plug into screens, it’s not hard to imagine ordering your meal while watching an episode of Star Trek is that far away.