- Some restaurants connect callers to an AI voice service to place DoorDash and Uber Eats orders.
- Voice AI company Kea takes orders from customers over the phone and sends them to delivery aggregators.
- Many people now place their delivery orders online, but Kea’s founder says restaurants sometimes struggle to handle phone orders.
A new voice AI service lets customers place delivery orders with services like DoorDash and Uber Eats via phone call.
Rather than having to order from an app or website, customers who call restaurants that use a product developed by Kea, a voice AI company, can simply say what they want to order. Kea then sends its order to a delivery aggregator.
“It’s so much better and easier to just say something and do it rather than letting me download an app, letting me add everything to the cart, letting me customize it, letting me add my credit card to it, and then pressing on all these buttons.” Adam Ahmad, CEO and founder of Kea, told Business Insider.
Before the app revolution, restaurants relied on phone calls for delivery orders. In 2023, more than 85% of Domino’s sales in the United States were made digitally. But there are still use cases for ordering over the phone rather than using a website or app, Ahmad said.
“They might be driving the kids home from school and it makes sense to press that call button,” he said, describing it as a “30-second interaction.”
When customers call to order delivery from a restaurant that uses Kea’s service, they will be linked to voice AI, which restaurants can choose from a variety of accents. The AI guides them through transactions, including suggesting add-ons and recommending items they received in previous orders, Ahmad said.
You can hear an example of how the software works on the Kea website.
“It’s not like Siri or Alexa where it stops you and makes you repeat,” he said. “It’s very fluid in its interaction.”
And if the AI has trouble understanding the customer – or vice versa – it can be transferred to a human Kea agent who will fulfill the order, Ahmad explained. About a quarter of calls made to Kea are transferred to its human agents, Ahmad said.
Kea told BI it has agents in nine countries, but the majority are based in the United States.
Kea uses an algorithm developed by Olo to determine which delivery services are available nearby and choose the best one for each customer based on cost and estimated arrival time, Ahmad explained. Delivery platforms Kea can return orders to include DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub and Favor, Ahmad said.
“We’ll upsell them throughout the call, and then at the very end of the call, they’ll have the option to tip the driver,” Ahmad said. “And at that point, an ETA is provided to them and the order is placed directly into the system.”
Customers do not need to have the delivery provider’s app to use Kea’s service, Ahmad said. They would still receive a link to track their driver, he said.
“We are of course not the delivery provider – we just process the voice order,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad incorporated Kea in 2018, “before all this language model craze,” he said. In addition to the new delivery service, Kea has for years operated a so-called “cloud checkout” service, which takes takeout orders and answers basic questions such as opening hours when customers call restaurants, Ahmad said.
Kea said the pizza chains she works with — which she couldn’t name due to NDAs — were already using the AI delivery feature. He plans to offer the service to his other restaurants later this month, he said. Kea takes a percentage of the orders he takes for restaurants.
Chains Kea works with include Wayback Burger, Newk’s Eatery and California Fish Grill. Kea declined to say how many restaurants it operates in, but said it was “hundreds.”
“A lot of them are takeout places, pizza places,” Ahmad said. “These are people who have three to five phone lines in their restaurant and they just can’t answer all the calls at once. It’s just too tedious. And so we’re focusing on those brands first , those who have a lot of incoming phone traffic and ultimately help them answer every phone call rather than putting people on hold.”
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