By Lea Mira, RTN staff editor – 9.28.2025
Two seafood chains take the plunge in artificial intelligence. Red Lobster and Captain D each announced this week that they planned to use the AI to take orders, the red lobster by phone and the captain of in the Drive-Thru. These are the latest brands to test automation in order to improve efficiency and stimulate sales, highlighting both the promise and unresolved questions around the voice of the restaurant.
Red Lobster, who is still working to stabilize his business after bankruptcy, joins Soundhound to automate his telephone lines on around 500 locations. The system is formed on the menu of the casual niage chain, can treat orders and answer customer questions, and is always available even when the staff is too busy to resume. The chain indicates that customers can always ask to be transferred to a human if they prefer. Beyond the convenience factor, the decision indicates how criticism has become critical in relaxed meals. Calls that have once struck unanswered now represent too large sources of income to leave random.
Captain D, meanwhile, deploys Presto Phoenix to manage orders behind the wheel at his 525 locations. The system not only takes orders, but also pushes guests with ascending sales and, ultimately, loyalty registrations. The CIO Sean McAnallly said at the FSTEC conference that the AI capacity to present regular loyalty registrations and, highlighted, recognize regular customers for personalized offers could be transformational. In theory, this means that an interaction at the wheel could evolve from a transaction to a targeted marketing point point.
These announcements come as the adoption of the voice of AI in restaurants is entering a second more serious wave. The first pilots of giants like McDonald’s showed how speeding the precision problems could derail ambitious projects. Many customers, in particular older demographic data, have been disabled by robotic interactions or subjects to errors. This reality was recognized in Fstec, where Long John Silver noted that his main guests often did not like the automation of the voice. However, supporters argue that the increase is too important to ignore: faster flow, coherent lower sale and labor savings at a time when the margins are thin.
This is where new entrants like Vox ai make their cause. The Amsterdam-based startup has just raised 8.7 million dollars in seed financing, bringing its total to $ 10 million, to extend its autonomous vocal platform designed specifically for fast service restaurants. Unlike previous systems adapted to vocal assistants for general use, Vox AI was built from zero to manage emerging and chaotic environments. Its training pipeline reproduces natural cadence and self-optimized in the field, learning local accents, slang and even acoustic whims. The company claims large -scale autonomy, without any required human surveillance and supports more than 90 languages, while connecting directly to existing post systems without new equipment. For operators, the land is difficult to ignore: up to 17x return on investment through shorter queues, higher sales and redeployed work.
The competitive landscape is crowded. Conversenow, Kea,, Soundhound,, Presto And new players love LOMAN AIWho closed a 3.5 million dollar financing cycle last month, shake niches in the phone, driving service or multi -channel order. Some are closely concentrated, such as Loman with the order of the phone, while others position their voice as the main interface of the QSR sector of billions of dollars. What differentiates Vox AI is its strategy and claiming true autonomy, which has experienced adaptive noise modeling and multilingual mastery overcoming the problems that condemned past efforts.
For the red lobster and the captain D, their last movements may seem increasing compared to the more daring vision of Vox AI. But together, these stories reflect the same reality: restaurants cannot afford to allow customers to escape in a missed call or a long line of driving. Voice AI not only becomes a technological experience, but a front -line operational tool. The issues are high. If this new generation of solutions can finally balance the precision, the acceptance of customers and the measurable return on investment, the way in which customers control seafood or everything that could be transformed. Otherwise, operators may flow more resources in technology than guests ultimately reject.
Fast service burgers, coffee giants and fast casual players are all faced with the same pressures: labor costs, customer impatience and digital competitors increasing the convenience bar. Voice Ai promises to approach these points of pain, but the winners will be the marks that deploy it with precision, integrate it deep into the operations and adapt it to their unique guest base. The next few years will determine whether the voice becomes the standard interface to order food or another history of prudence in the long history of the outdoor technology of the catering industry.
