This Foodable podcast interviews me!

This Foodable podcast interviews me!
This Forbe’s article pretty much sums up our view about conversational ordering (and quotes Orderscape). You may not yet see how consumers will use voice assistants and mobile voice search to order food, search for flights, hotels, restaurant or find a table, but you will. Think about how seamless it is to use your smartphone for tasks that a few years ago didn’t seem possible or even necessary. But, smartphones and native apps on Android and iOS devices have changed our lives and disrupted many industries in positive ways. It’s an exciting time because voice-assisted anything is the future of everything…just suspend a little disbelief and let it happen.
We’ve developed several use cases for how consumers order food. Regardless of the medium, voice is different. In a voice construct, we have to get to the point and be very concise about food item selection. After all, we generally decide what we have a hankering for before we know here to go to feed that hunger. In connection with these learnings, here is a diagram of how we view the voice ordering journey, from a consumers’ perspective. The objective is, or course, to create a superior ordering experience so they will prefer to use their voice and a voice assistant gateway, instead of their thumbs. Then, really cool things can occur, like suggestive ordering, and finally, predictive ordering using machine learning, our proprietary food taxonomy and AI.
Get your brand voice ready
Voice-assisted anything is the future of everything. Of course, we’re biased. But, we are also students and teachers at the same time, being totally committed to voice. So, if voice search + commerce is mission critical for the enterprise and the longtail, brands must, absolutely must voice-ready their content. If you’re a restaurant that means get your menu voice-enabled. If you are a retailer, same thing, get your catalog voice-enabled. Modify your keywords on your website to be more applicable to natural language. Un-brand your product names so they can be more easily discovered generically. From “Bob’s fabulous Fettuccine Alfredo” to “Fettuccine Alfredo”. Even better, add a microphone to your mobile app as training wheels for consumers to a more voice-centric e-commerce landscape and economy. We can do that for you!
Voice is here today, folks. It’s not some future thing that will just suddenly be everywhere. The metrics are astounding, so I encourage you to search “conversational commerce” or “Voice UI” or “voice ordering”, “voice search”, anything “voice ________” and read, learn. Orderscape is voice-enabling millions of menu items, developing a food-centric taxonomy for a voice environment. That’s a first for the restaurant industry. It’s a huge undertaking and it will pay dividends to us and the industry at large as well as provide a superior consumer user experience when ordering food via Google Assistant, or Alexa.
I saw this article and wanted to share it. It’s spot-on about bringing voice to brands with a few tips on where to start. If you are a restaurant brand, call us, we are all-in on voice as a service, for search and commerce.
I remember one time years ago on a lunch shift, when it was 11:45 AM, a full 15 minutes after we we were scheduled to open for business as usual, but there was not a single customer in the restaurant. The bartender was ready and the foodservers were standing by in their assigned sections. The hostess was primed with menus in hand and the kitchen was prepped and ready for another busy lunch. We always opened with a small line of hungry customers outside. Our doors always open precisely at 11:30 AM. But, this was weird. Not a single customer was in the restaurant, a full 15 minutes into our lunch shift. I was the manager/owner at the time and I was in the kitchen completing a line check when a server casually said “what’s the deal? No customers”. I immediately came out, went to the front door and there, standing in line were about 50 people. A couple of them were looking in the windows seemingly asking the same question, WTF? Yep, the doors were locked. The lunch was fine, after we managed the crazy rush seating 50 people all at once. But, this was a big business lesson that has never left me. You can’t sell food to customers if the doors are locked.
Orderscape is a visionary voice technology startup with a big vision to disrupt and redefine how consumers order food using mobile devices. Talk, order, eat is a mantra around here because that’s all it is. Say what you want into a microphone and then pick up your meal or have it delivered. Simple, efficient and hands free. Elegant frankly, because it’s so natural for humans to just use our voice. But the technology is crazy complex to develop. It’s taken 2 years and while we’re ready to go, but we’re dealing with locked doors on the restaurant side of the marketplace.
Yes, we’re “early”. I’ve heard that hundreds of times over the past 2 years from investors and operators and even some technology vendors. RestTech experts are wowed by our vision and compliment us on our technology. Many of these restaurant technology vendors are anxious to work with us because they know voice is here today and will be a big, big deal. Research companies know this too. Capgemini polled thousands of voice assistant users and discovered 56% of them wanted to order food from restaurants now, today, if they could. But they can’t, not yet. They could with Orderscape’s Universal Menu platform, however. Narvar Consumer Reports said, 60.5M people in the U.S. today are already using digital assistants like Alexa to conduct searches and place orders. Demand is here. Orderscape is here. So are we just early? Or, are the doors just locked?