The AI helps cut both personal contact and delivery times at Lee’s drive-thru.

Drive-thru, fast food restaurants such as Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken at Englewood, Ohio, face both staff shortages and a surge in customer demand due to the pandemic. Employees are getting harder to find because they are reluctant to work in a customer-facing position for hours on end while wearing a mask. On the other hand, pandemic -wary customers find drive-thru’s a good solution to pick up food quickly and at minimal contagion risk. (DAYTON.COM)

Squeezed at both ends, the restaurant has resorted to conversational AI to help take some of the pressure off.  Technology company, Hi Auto provided the system to take and place orders at the Lee drive-thru.

AI at Lee’s Famous Recipe: How it works

Hi Auto Chief Technical Officer Eyal Shapira explained that conversational AI technology could recognize speech even in a very noisy environment.

After extracting the customer’s voice command from the surrounding noise (such as traffic or other people talking in the car) the system then passes the extract through a natural language processor to understand the meaning of what the customer said.

Savings in time

The AI-powered system has cut short the wait times at the Lee’s Famous Recipe drive-thru as well as made service to customers faster.

“Sometimes customers have to wait while the workers finish with another customer,” Franchise CEO Chuck Doran said. “We can service every customer as soon as they pull into the drive-thru, take the order and get it in and maybe avoid some of those unnecessary delays that we run into and improve the overall service experience.”

“Number one expectation of customers when they enter a drive-thru is the speed of service,” added Doran. “So I viewed this as an opportunity to potentially address that issue.”

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