Presto Automation Inc., a leader in restaurant technology, announced the introduction of a custom voice feature in its Presto Voice drive-thru automation solution. This highly innovative feature, an industry first, takes the drive-thru experience to a new level, allowing guests to converse with celebrities, mascots, characters, or other custom voices while placing an order at the drive-thru.

With custom voices, drive-thru ordering is transformed from a purely transactional experience to an exciting interaction that guests look forward to and want to experience more frequently. The new Presto Voice feature is expected to help fast-food restaurants increase sales, boost order accuracy, and improve brand loyalty while delighting customers.

Presto Voice is currently the industry’s most widely adopted A.I.-powered drive-thru voice assistant with over 75% market share. It delivers strong return on investment by boosting upsell revenue by an average of $330,000 per year and reducing labor costs by $35,000 per year for a typical drive-thru restaurant.

Quick-service restaurants are experiencing significant headwinds, including the labor shortage, inflation, and a looming recession. For some operators, forced wage increases like those driven by the California FAST Recovery Act (Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act) further increase their cost pressures. As drive-thru demand grows and headwinds continue, automation becomes the best solution. Presto Voice offers a significant advantage to restaurants by minimizing human error, reducing wait times, and freeing up staff so they can focus on improving customer experience.

The unique experiences enabled by this new Presto Voice feature include:

• Celebrity Voices: Guests can experience drive-thru voice ordering by conversing with a celebrity, whose voice would be programmed to know the whole menu.
• Seasonal Experiences: Presto Voice can be customized to take orders in different voices according to the season, such as Santa Claus during Christmas, or a witch during Halloween.
• Brand Mascots: Restaurants can customize the order-taking voice to be the voice of their own brand mascot, such as Ronald McDonald, Jack Box, Colonel Sanders, the King, or others.
• Local Experiences: The voice can be customized for local events or experiences such as players on local sports teams, local heroes, and for other campaigns.
• Local Accents: Presto Voice can be customized to use local accents, slang, and colloquialisms.
• Limitless Flexibility: The voice customization feature in Presto Voice is very flexible, offering limitless customizations in practically any voice.

 

According to a recent Presto survey, 68% of consumers aged 18-44 years said that they are significantly more likely to go to a drive-thru if it offers a celebrity voice to take orders.

“Automation technology doesn’t have to be boring or impersonal. We are proud to bring this highly innovative automation solution that delivers exciting guest experiences while improving staff productivity,” says Rajat Suri, founder and CEO of Presto. “The key is to deploy and integrate Presto Voice early on to stay ahead of the curve.”

“The lack of quality talent is crippling the fast food industry, forcing many to cut back on operating time. Employees also often complain about being treated poorly by customers. Presto provides an automation solution that addresses both these issues by supplementing the ever-smaller staff with conversational A.I. that can cover a shift and improve employee satisfaction,” shares technology analyst Rob Enderle of The Enderle Group.

Due to the current labor shortage, quick-service restaurants are forced to often operate at lower capacity, which leads to lower revenue and customer frustration. Presto Voice is specifically designed to help quick-service restaurants fully reopen and scale – even with limited staff. With Presto Voice, guests place orders in a natural conversational style via highly accurate automated speech recognition, even in the noisiest environments. And the new custom voice feature is expected to significantly enhance the guest experience and make drive-thru ordering delightful for visitors.

Presto Voice is a powerful next-generation solution that uses A.I. to automate speech recognition for drive-thru restaurants. The voice solution can be augmented with Presto VisionTM, another A.I.-powered product that provides 16 unique operational metrics on drive-thru performance. These real-time metrics can help reduce wait time and increase order accuracy. Presto FlexTM complements the A.I. technology stack as a custom-designed, multi-purpose tablet that can be interchangeably deployed for a variety of restaurant dine-in and drive-thru applications including pay-at-table, staff handheld, kiosk, and drive-thru line busting.