Introduction

Northern Arizona University and VoiceOrder Solutions are partnering to embrace a leading-edge voice technology strategy for the hospitality, food, and beverage industries. The relationship will provide NAU students with the ability to place orders, provide software design recommendations and contribute to the advancement of a leading-edge innovation. VoiceOrder Solutions is proud to collaborate with NAU’s faculty, students, and distributors to bring innovation and efficiencies to the hospitality, food ,and beverage industries.

An Industry Challenge to Efficiency and Effectiveness in the Kitchen: Ordering

Today, the food, beverage and hospitality industries have struggled to keep pace with the advancement of technology. Currently, most of the technology advancements have been oriented towards the “front of the house” operations such as , point of sale, online-ordering, and delivery services. In our analyses , we r believe that minor “back of the house” operations advancements have been made.

With increased pressure on operational efficiency due to rising labor cost, staffing shortages and inflationary ingredient costs; the food, beverage, and hospitality industries will need to embrace new technologies to increase their productivity.

Minimal changes have been made for restaurant operators who have relied on antiquated methods to order their food items like using clipboards, fax machines, phone orders, and eCommerce sites. For example, an average restaurant operator manages 7+ distributor relationships and places 2-3 orders per week. This critically important aspect of the restaurant operations requires an abnormal amount of time and effort by the operator.

Technology Advancement

Voice technology will become a significant solution to combat the antiquated and inefficient ordering process for restaurant operators and their distributors. This highly sophisticated technology will be shaped, designed, and developed to streamline the “back of the house” ordering process.

From an industry perspective, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have made significant financial and technology commitments to the advancement of speech recognition. With the progression of artificial intelligent enabled machine learning, voice technology’s accuracy has increased beyond 95%. Furthermore, it is well understood that humans prefer to communication via speech. A human on average speaks 140 words per minute comparatively they type 40 words per minute. Finally, to illustrate the upcoming dominance of this technology, its predicted that keyboards will become obsolete by the end of this decade.

In the palm of their hands, restaurant operators will have a highly efficient, time saving and operational well-organized way to order their food using speech ordering. Leveraging the big three’s voice technology commitment, a custom-built voice-based application designed for the food, beverage and hospitality industry will create incredible value for operators and distributors.

Below are some quotes from NAU Hospitality Management students experiencing the VoiceOrder software:

  • Great idea, I’ve worked in the restaurant business since I was 16 and this will change the way restaurants order food.
  • I think it’s an awesome idea that will add a lot of simplicity and ease to the ordering process.
  • Overall great idea. With your recent development I can see this product going the distance.
  • I think this technology has a lot of potential across multiple industries. It simplifies ordering food and helps save time which is very important in any industry.
  • I think this product has a very bright future and will help the order process go by much smoother.

Conclusion

VoiceOrder: A new innovative, efficiency, and effectiveness technology solution for the Hospitality industry (https://www.voiceordersolutions.com/).

Acknowledgment: This research paper is sponsored by the GloMed.Education website.

Fred DeMicco
Northern Arizona University