Voice technology supports restaurant staff and bolsters sales

SoundHound AI, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOUN) (“SoundHound”), a global leader in voice artificial intelligence, today announced that it has joined the Toast Partner Ecosystem. This integration will introduce SoundHound for Restaurants as a voice technology provider to restaurants using Toast’s point-of-sale system (POS). It will allow restaurants to accept voice orders over the phone and transmit the order directly to Toast’s platform.

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SoundHound for Restaurants voice assistant learns the menu of each business and can answer questions, accept modifications and even upsell. (Graphic: Business Wire)

This integration also helps restaurants to take more orders and answer simple questions about business hours and location directions automatically. Staff can focus on the service that they provide to guests dining in or grabbing takeout.

The SoundHound for Restaurants voice assistant can be deployed by any restaurant to seamlessly take food and drink orders over the phone, via menu kiosks or at the drive-thru. Its sophisticated technology learns the menu of each business and can answer questions, accept modifications and even upsell, helping the restaurant process more orders quickly and efficiently.

SoundHound’s advanced system uses patented voice AI that can understand natural human speech. This way, a customer doesn’t have to modify their language to interact with software, they can just speak as they would to another person.

Toast is a cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform purpose-built for the entire restaurant community. It works with integration partners in its Toast Partner Ecosystem, a curated portfolio of more than 180 partners who deliver specialized technology and services to help restaurant operators streamline sales, engage guests, and keep employees happy.

​​“We’re delighted to introduce SoundHound For Restaurant’s voice technology to our Toast Partner Ecosystem. With more restaurants finding a need to automate interactions like ordering and sales, we’re happy to be working with SoundHound to help optimize these functions and more,” says Keith Corbin, Senior Director, Business Development from Toast. “By bringing SoundHound to the Toast Platform, we’re helping restaurants keep up with changing guest expectations and deliver a more personalized experience to guests.”

SoundHound offers its voice AI technology to a range of world-class brands, including Hyundai, Pandora, Snap, VIZIO, LG and Mercedes-Benz. Through SoundHound, each of these companies can offer voice technology that is built from the ground up and optimized for human speech. This means they can easily tackle complex use cases that go beyond basic search functionalities – like restaurant food ordering – providing a dynamic and robust solution where other voice technology companies have struggled.

Toast customer US Cafe recently looked to SoundHound for Restaurants to help strategically manage in-bound calls and optimize order-taking. This has helped give their staff more time to give an even higher level of service to dine-in customers at their Georgia restaurant.

“As a local restaurant operating out of Georgia for over 30 years, US Cafe has recently turned towards innovative technology solutions to improve our processes and solve any challenges that come our way,” said Milan V. Patel, Director of Operations at US Cafe. “We’re incredibly excited to be partnered with SoundHound for Restaurants as their voice AI ordering solution helps our team members provide greater attention to our in-restaurant patrons rather than answering inbound calls.”

With SoundHound technology, customers can speak fluently without worrying about turn-taking or wake words. They can also verbally modify and edit their order with ease, just as they would in any other ordering scenario.

“Restaurant customers want to place food orders quickly and with minimum hassle. Our fast, accurate voice technology allows them to do that by speaking as naturally as they would to a person,” says James Hom, Chief Product Officer at SoundHound. “More restaurants are now seeing a fantastic return on investment from voice AI and a better customer experience. By integrating with Toast, we can’t wait to bring our simple-to-deploy solution to more restaurants.”

Find out more about SoundHound for Restaurants here.

About SoundHound

SoundHound (Nasdaq: SOUN), a leading innovator of conversational intelligence, offers an independent voice AI platform that enables businesses across industries to deliver best-in-class conversational experiences to their customers. Built on proprietary Speech-to-Meaning® and Deep Meaning Understanding® technologies, SoundHound’s advanced voice AI platform provides exceptional speed and accuracy and enables humans to interact with products and services like they interact with each other—by speaking naturally. SoundHound is trusted by companies around the globe, including Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Pandora, Qualcomm, Netflix, Snap, Square, LG, VIZIO, KIA, and Stellantis. www.soundhound.com

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