Voice is the oldest ordering channel in the restaurant business—and, until now, easily the least automated. Think of every missed phone call during a dinner rush, every misheard drive-thru order, every staffer pulled off the line to grab a handset. That fragility has a price tag, and it shows up as lost revenue exactly when you can least afford it.
A new partnership aims to close that gap. On July 23, 2026, Deliverect, the global restaurant technology platform serving more than 80,000 locations worldwide, announced a partnership with SoundHound AI (Nasdaq: SOUN), a global leader in voice and agentic AI, to fully automate restaurant voice ordering—from the moment a customer speaks to the moment the kitchen receives the order.
Voice In, Order Out—No Manual Re-Entry
The integration connects SoundHound Smart Ordering directly to Deliverect's order and menu management platform. SoundHound's voice AI agents pull real-time menu and location data from Deliverect, capture orders across every voice channel, and route them straight to kitchen fulfillment through Deliverect's certified POS integrations.
The result is a single automated loop across drive-thru, phone, kiosk, and in-car channels, in more than 100 languages. No manual re-entry. No handoff errors. No added burden on restaurant teams.
For operators, the pain point this solves is a familiar one. The journey from a spoken order to the kitchen has traditionally involved staff, manual re-entry, and multiple points of failure—missed or abandoned phone calls, order errors, and inconsistent experiences from one channel to the next.
What Operators Actually Get
- Higher order capture — AI voice agents answer every call, so no order slips through during peak hours.
- Real-time menu accuracy — pricing and availability sync directly from Deliverect, with no manual updates across channels.
- Consistent upselling and LTOs — limited-time-offer promotion runs the same across every ordering channel.
- Faster throughput — reduced wait times and quicker service.
- Freed-up staff — teams move off the phones and back to cooking and taking care of guests in person.
"Voice is the oldest ordering channel in the restaurant business, and until now it's been the least automated. This partnership changes that. By connecting SoundHound's AI voice agents directly to Deliverect, every spoken order, whether it comes through the drive-thru, a phone call, or a kiosk, flows straight into the kitchen with the same accuracy and speed as a digital order. For operators, that means no more missed calls, no more re-keying, and teams that can focus on hospitality instead of handsets. It's a major step toward the fully connected restaurant we're building with our partners."
— Don MacMillan, Head of Partnerships for the US and Canada at Deliverect.
Any Market, Any POS, No Custom Builds
Scaling voice ordering internationally has long been throttled by the cost and complexity of building direct POS integrations market by market. Deliverect removes that obstacle. With more than 550 POS integrations across over 50 countries, Smart Ordering can go live in virtually any market, on virtually any POS, without custom development.
Combined with support for more than 100 languages, the partnership hands international restaurant groups a future-proof ordering infrastructure that scales across channels, markets, and languages—without rebuilding for every new touchpoint or region.
"The future of restaurant hospitality relies on automation and convenience. Partnering with Deliverect allows us to deeply embed SoundHound's AI voice agents into the restaurant tech stack. By syncing critical menu and location data, our AI voice agents can handle order placement flawlessly, reducing front-of-house strain and delivering a seamless customer experience."
— Mike Lauricella, VP of Channel Partnerships at SoundHound AI.
Why It Matters
For restaurant operators and foodservice executives, this is a labor and revenue-recovery play as much as a tech story. Every abandoned phone call during a rush is a lost ticket, and every hand-keyed order is a chance for error and comps. Automating the voice channel targets both problems at once—capturing demand you were already leaving on the table while redeploying labor toward the guest experience.
The strategic angle for multi-unit and international groups is the integration layer. Because Smart Ordering rides on Deliverect's 550-plus POS integrations across 50-plus countries, operators can add a voice-ordering channel without commissioning custom development per system or per market. That lowers the barrier to piloting AI voice at a few locations before rolling it out at scale.
The practical takeaway: as customer expectations tilt toward voice-first and self-service experiences, audit where your current voice channel leaks—missed calls, re-keying errors, inconsistent upsell prompts—and evaluate whether an automated loop pays for itself in recovered orders and reallocated labor.
For more on how operators are rethinking their tech stack and beverage economics, see our coverage of how hospitality operators are reengineering beverage programs for scale and the latest trends in food and beverage.
The Bottom Line
Deliverect has powered 1.5+ billion orders to date and processes 30 million API calls daily; SoundHound's agentic platform, OASYS, is backed by 400+ patents and processes billions of interactions annually. Together, they're betting that the fully connected restaurant runs on automation that reaches all the way from a customer's voice to the kitchen line.
Is your operation ready to automate the voice channel—or is the phone still tying up your best people during the rush? Weigh in and share how you're approaching AI in your restaurant tech stack in the comments.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 40 Under 40” for founding American Wholesale Floral. Politz is also the founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
