AI is finding its voice — and using it to take your weeknight pizza order.
Restaurants, including Domino's and Wingstop, have used voice AI assistants for years to chat with customers on the phone and take their orders. Lately, though, they've been finessing those assistants by adding region-specific accents, adjusting their tone, and making other changes that make them more natural for customers to converse with.
"If someone hears a really off-putting, unrelatable voice, they're going to hang up," said Lily Clifford, the CEO and founder of Rime Labs, which developed the text-to-voice model that Domino's and Wingstop use.
Multiple restaurant chains are using voice AI to take customers' orders. But Rime's experience shows that it's not as easy as shoving an AI assistant with a robotic voice in a drive-thru or on one end of a phone line.
Rime develops the text-to-voice technology that Domino's uses for phone ordering. Another company, ConverseNow, provides the AI assistant itself.
When ConverseNow started working with Domino's about five years ago, it used a different voice that many customers didn't want to speak with, said Akshay Kayastha, director of engineering at ConverseNow.
"There was one point where 50% of the people were just saying they just didn't want to talk to it," and asked to be transferred to a human, he said.
Rime's technology has pushed that number closer to 100%, Clifford said. Domino's uses the text-to-voice feature in about 80% of its phone orders in North America, she added.
"It should sound like someone who could work at Domino's and not someone who is a 20th-century American broadcast radio announcer," Clifford said.
To develop its technology, Rime built a recording studio in San Francisco and recorded a variety of people having conversations with a friend or a family member. The goal, Clifford said, was to capture what day-to-day speech sounds like instead of using voice actors reading rehearsed lines.
The resulting technology can use a variety of speech patterns.
Domino's customers who order by phone in Atlanta, for instance, are likely to reach an AI assistant that speaks with a Southern accent. Rime says that it has also developed a voice that speaks using African-American Vernacular English. The voices that Rime uses don't belong to real people, though, Clifford said.
Tone is another area where Rime's technology has improved voice AI, Kayastha said.
One restaurant chain that ConverseNow works with pointed out a problem with an earlier version of the startup's voice AI: It sounded more chipper than most fast-food workers. Rime's technology helped match the tone to the situation, Kayastha said.
"No one in real life speaks so cheerfully at a drive-thru," he said. "You've got to turn it down."
The voice-to-text technology also correctly pronounces specific menu items, such as MeatZZa, a Domino's pizza with pepperoni, ham, Italian sausage, and beef. That's key for restaurants, Clifford said, given all of the unconventional spellings and limited-time offers that appear on their menus.
Domino's has grown its online ordering options lately. Customers can place orders on Domino's website, through its app, or through third-party services like Uber and DoorDash.
But phone orders remain a key part of the pizza chain's business, CEO Russell Weiner said during an earnings call in late 2023.
"We have a large number of our customers coming in on online ordering, but we still need to make sure that the phones are there operationally," Weiner said.
Domino's and Wingstop did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Workers across many industries are worried that their bosses will use AI to replace them. Clifford said that Rime's restaurant clients aren't using its AI voice technology to replace employees, though.
Restaurant workers are often too busy preparing food, helping customers who show up in-store, and completing other tasks to take phone orders, she said. In that sense, voice AI that can field orders is taking a task off their plate.
"If you're at the restaurant making pizzas and wings, you do not want to answer that phone," Clifford said. "You have a million other things to do."
