SoundHound develops voice-based ordering

SoundHound has entered the digital menu game with its voice-ordering technology harnessing AI to allow customers to make and edit drive-through orders without going through a drive through attendant, according to a Feb. 15 video demonstration and a press release.

SoundHound aims to remove barriers by making the system self-correcting and fast with technologies including fragment parsing (which processes pieces of spoken sentences in real-time); the solution aims to allow for instantaneous, self-correcting understanding of orders without requiring slow speech or pauses, as well as knowing to ignore speech unrelated to the order and using audio and visual feedback to check if its interpretation of speech is accurate, offering audiovisual output and allowing touchscreen input if needed for customers, along with automating suggestive-sell to customers.

"As the Dynamic Interaction demo shows, this technology is incredibly user-friendly and precise," Keyvan Mohajer, co-founder and CEO at SoundHound, said in the release. "Consumers won't have to modify how they speak to the voice assistant to get a useful response — they can just speak as naturally as they would to a human. As an added bonus they'll also have the means to instantly know and edit registered requests. In our 17 year history of developing cutting-edge voice AI, this is perhaps the most important technical leap forward. We believe, just like how Apple's multi-touch technology leapfrogged touch interfaces in 2007, this is a significant disruption in human-computer interfaces."

The Feb. 15 video demonstration is available below.