Revolutionizing Dining: DoorDash Introduces AI Phone Ordering for Restaurants

0:00So the first thing I want to talk about here is the fact that DoorDash is really stepping up its game in the food delivery ecosystem. So it has the introduction of a voice-powered AI ordering technology. And essentially, this is aiming to bridge the gap between restaurants and customers who prefer the more traditional route of placing orders over the phone. Of course, I'm a big fan of DoorDash. When you pop open the app, you go scroll down, look at everything you want, you make an order. But there are a lot of people, admittedly, in, you know, I'm currently in Canada right now. I'm in a little bit more of an older traditional town.

0:34I bet you over 50 % of the people here don't want to order something on their phone. They probably want to do it on their mobile phone, on an app. They want to do it over a phone call. And this is where I think this is going to come in. So this move really kind of comes as part of the company's broader strategy to provide tech forward solutions to the restaurant industry, which it outlined at their 2023 restaurant online ordering trends report. But essentially, the report highlights a really revealing pain point. So although one in five customers prefers ordering takeout by phone, almost half of these calls go unanswered.

1:10So when you make a phone call to a restaurant, I'm sure you've experienced this because I have as well, right? If their hours aren't published online, I'm like, oh, got to give them a call and make sure they're actually like open. And apparently 50 % of calls to restaurants go unanswered. The staff is busy serving people. There's a crisis at the restaurant. All sorts of things could happen. They're short staff. They're not going to answer the phone call. But this is actually leading to missed revenue and missed revenue opportunities. So addressing this issue, Raja, who is the head of product and design at DoorDash said, quote, customers expect more from restaurateurs and in return, restaurateurs expect even more technology forward solutions from us, including support for phone channels to meet customers where they're ordering.

1:52So supporting operators by capturing customer demand through investment in our voice product is one way we're delivering more and enabling our partners to grow their business. So essentially DoorDash's new voice ordering system aims to capture this unmet customer demand by combining AI technology with a live customer service agents. And this hybrid approach kind of ensures that customer calls are answered promptly, even when the restaurant itself is, you know, at high kind of peak hours. And I think this is going to actually free up the restaurant staff to concentrate on in-house customers. the whole system is kind of designed to be cost efficient by providing select restaurant operators the means to drive incremental revenue, right?

2:33Of course, this isn't going to be the number one source of revenue for these restaurants, but there is, you know, one in five per people that like to order over the phone. And if 50 % of those people are, you know, being lost, I think that equates to around 10 % business that you could essentially increase for your restaurant by having a system like this. So I think from the customer's perspective, the voice ordering service kind of promises a streamlined experience. It's going to be supporting multiple languages and offering features like quick reordering of your favorite meals. Live agents will also be readily available to provide support as needed, right?

3:10So if you just get stuck with a bot that doesn't understand what you're saying, you have that option as well. But I think for those restaurants wanting to add a delivery option to their phone orders, DoorDash has them covered with the DoorDash drive. And I think that this kind of white label solution offers businesses really an intuitive end-to-end customer experience that includes, you know, real-time tracking of orders and everything else. So I think overall DoorDash's kind of new AI-powered voice ordering system has the potential to be a real big game changer. And it really would kind of resolve this age-old issue of unanswered phone calls that I have experienced way too often.

3:47And also just the lost revenue that goes along with that entire, you know, experience of not people not being able to order. Now, the reason that I think this is so interesting is because recently we saw some technology unveiled, I believe it was called Air AI, where essentially, it was a conversation. And then the demo that they gave was someone that was like, I think it was like a sales rep for Tesla selling a Tesla. and it was a person calling in, asking a bunch of questions. I actually believe that it was a cold, not a cold, but like a warm outreach. So it was like, hey, I'm a customer sales rep.

4:19I saw that you were looking at a Tesla online. I'm wondering if, you know, there's a reason why you didn't finish your purchase, blah, blah, blah, whatever salespeople, kind of the flow that they go down. But it was 100 % done by AI. Now, there was little tiny delays as it had to compute between the conversation and whatnot. And so that gave me, this is a few weeks ago, but that really gave me the first glimpse of, oh my gosh, like sales, now this DoorDash ordering thing, it's going to be customer support trained on specialized data sets. It's going to be able to essentially do a lot of what used to be a person on the phone.

4:54And even if you think about this, right, like with DoorDash, they're saying, hey, we got like a live agent that's ready to take your call. So, you know, it's not displacing them. They're still around, but this is just kind of like the first order or the first person that is going to get it. But to be honest, I would bet you in a number of months or maybe a year or years, the technology is going to be so good that you will not need a live agent behind the scenes to help support. It's going to know every situation. It's going to know every issue that can come up. It's going to know everything about the menu and the restaurant and just be able to get that information.

5:27So I think this technology is getting better and better. And And along that vein, Eleven Labs actually just released a new feature, which I believe I covered in a podcast episode, where essentially they are providing instantaneous streaming of AI audio. So previously what happened would be, you know, you would talk to these, you'd talk to one of these AI things and really fast they'd try to compute the whole, everything that you were saying, send it over to something like ChaiGPD or a language model essentially to compute what a response should be. It would spit it out, it would generate an audio file, it would try to do all this stuff lightning fast and it immediately give you the audio file.

6:06Now there was a little latency because it had to do a lot of that computing, but with 11LAB's new technology, essentially they're live streaming the response in real time. So like when you ask ChadGPT a question, you watch it typing out. Previously, it had to finish typing, generate the auto file and send it. Now with the live streaming feature as ChadGPT or whatever language model you use is like writing out your response. The audio is literally being spoken. So it's instantaneous results. It's, you know, live computing what you're saying and then it's live streaming back to you. It's a response.

6:38So it makes these conversations online with customer service bots or this kind of DoorDash technology or sales very, very quick. And I believe that the technology is going to get very good in a very short amount of time and essentially will have some massive displacements for anyone that's doing calls over the phone, sales, customer service, answering phones and doing these orders for restaurants. So it's gonna be a very interesting space to follow in the future But the technology is getting very uncanny very good and it's going to have a very very big impact. I believe