How Drive-Thru AI Voices Can Push You To Spend More Money

If you've dropped by the drive-thru recently, it's possible that the voice that took your order wasn't a real person, but an artificial intelligence (AI) bot. Fast food chains have seized on AI-powered drive-thru systems, particularly in the last year or so. According to The Verge, Wendy's planned to start testing an AI drive-thru in Ohio in mid-2023, while White Castle is aiming to get them into over 100 restaurants throughout 2024. The parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's is also on the bandwagon. However, all of these companies are rolling AI out slowly, not to every restaurant they own.

One reason these companies like AI is that it can decrease a restaurant's labor needs by about 40 hours per week. But perhaps a bigger incentive is that they boost sales. These AI systems are specifically designed to upsell you on items — recommending drinks, sides, and other extras. One company that makes these systems, Presto Automation, has boasted that its AI will try to upsell on every single order, and can even tailor what it asks you to buy, perhaps based on the time of day, the weather, or what else is in your order. Of course, humans can upsell too, but if you've ever worked as a server, you may know that it can get exhausting to push customers to buy more stuff. So sometimes, you might just not do it — but an AI would never have those human hesitations.

Of course, a not-quite-human robot voice asking if you'd like fries with that may not be terribly convincing, but at least one AI drive-thru developer has another trick up its sleeve. In late 2023, Hi Auto, a company that's committed to drive-thru ordering technology, rolled out a system that can clone real human voices, replicating their accent and speech patterns. The goal isn't just to make the speaker box sound more human — it's so that fast food chains can duplicate the voices of real celebrities, making customers feel like they're talking to the real deal.

Hi Auto explained in a press release that Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken — an Ohio chain — is already on board, replicating the voice of radio host and former NFL player Keith Byars for the drive-thru system at a few of its restaurants. Of course, the company has Byars' permission to do this — so don't expect to hear everyone from Taylor Swift to Pedro Pascal at the drive-thru, since fast food chains would likely need to pay for the rights to celebrities' voices. It's hard to say if this technology would directly help a chain sell more food, but it may help indirectly. Hi Auto claims that it could make for smoother communication and better branding, and customers may feel more at ease (and therefore more likely to spend) if they're speaking to a realistic voice, rather than an awkward AI one.

The companies making AI systems love to talk up how revolutionary they are. For example, in one blog post, Hi Auto says that systems like its own make orders more accurate, speed up drive-thru wait times, and lower restaurants' labor costs. Interestingly, the company doesn't mention whether its systems increase revenue, although its competitor Presto Automation claims that AI systems can try to upsell customers four times more often than workers, resulting in 6% more sales.

But even if they boost sales, the systems aren't a magic wand to solve all of a fast food restaurant's issues. For example, they usually need to be monitored by an employee behind the scenes to make sure they're getting everything correct, and they often give customers the chance to speak to a human if they don't like the system, according to Bloomberg. But if a restaurant wants to sell more food, perhaps it's important to consider the fact that some customers may hate the AI systems, especially when they're being prodded to buy more. At the moment, AI drive-thrus aren't common enough for companies to know whether they really do a better job, but at the very least, they're going to do their darnedest to get you to buy some more fries or a shake.