The drive-thru speaker and the phone line are where restaurant AI grew up. These five companies are taking it to scale.
The bottom line: Voice AI is the front door of restaurant AI. The five Best Voice AI finalists in the Savor AI 50: The 2026 Restaurant AI Awards are taking orders at the drive-thru, on the phone and across apps for some of the biggest brands in the business, and they're publishing real numbers on accuracy and volume. Winners are revealed Dec. 1.
The problem voice AI is solving
The drive-thru is the most important and most stressful seat in a quick-service restaurant. Wendy's has said 75% to 80% of its customers choose the drive-thru. The crew member on the headset is taking orders, making change and coaching a new hire at the same time. And on the phone side, a missed call during the dinner rush is a missed sale.
That's why voice is where operators have moved first. Savor AI 50 research tracked 77 restaurant brands with sourced AI deployments, and 39 of them use AI to take drive-thru or phone orders, more than any other use.
But this is also the category where guests push back fastest. McDonald's ended its IBM drive-thru test, and Del Taco dropped its system. Even the deployments that are scaling still keep a crew member in the loop. Dairy Queen's CEO said early Presto trials showed 90% order accuracy against a goal of more than 99%, with employees monitoring the orders.
I've watched every major restaurant tech cycle since I coined "fast casual," and voice is the one guests feel directly. That makes the gap between a good demo and a good Friday night bigger here than anywhere else in the restaurant.
The 5 Best Voice AI finalists
Finalists are listed alphabetically. No order or ranking is implied.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud has been building restaurant voice AI since its work with Wendy's on FreshAI, which Wendy's says is powered by Google Cloud's large language models and processes tens of thousands of orders daily. In January 2026, Papa Johns became the launch partner for Google Cloud's Food Ordering agent, taking voice and text ordering beyond the drive-thru to the app, website, phone, kiosk and car.
Hi Auto
Hi Auto's AI Order Taker is installed at more than 1,000 restaurants, including Bojangles, Checkers & Rally's, Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken, Burger King New Zealand and Popeyes UK. Its biggest showcase, Bojangles' Bo-Linda, handles more than 1 million orders a week with a 98% success rate, according to the companies, and Bojangles signed a multiyear extension in October.
Omilia
Omilia's voice AI now runs in more than 890 Taco Bell drive-thrus across 38 states under a deal announced in July 2026. Omilia reports that at Taco Bell, more than 90% of orders are handled without human intervention, with a 5% to 10% lift in average check.
Presto
Presto, which says it has hundreds of drive-thrus live with Presto Voice, landed Dairy Queen this year. After testing in company stores, Dairy Queen expanded the pilot to at least 25 franchisees, with plans to reach substantially all of its roughly 3,000 U.S. and Canadian drive-thrus. Its new Toast integration is running at roughly 95% order accuracy, according to Presto.
SoundHound AI
SoundHound AI is one of the broadest voice platforms in restaurants, saying it powers more than 15,000 locations. Casey's renewed and expanded its deal in April, with SoundHound's ordering agents in more than 2,600 stores and more than 21 million guest interactions handled to date. Red Lobster is also rolling out SoundHound's phone ordering agent across all locations.
What this category tells us
Scale is finally real. Thousands of locations, millions of orders a week. Voice AI has moved past the one-store pilot for brands that picked the right partner.
Accuracy is the whole game. Every finalist leads with an accuracy or completion number, and the industry's public failures came from the guest experience, not the technology budget.
Voice is going omnichannel. The drive-thru proved it out. Now the same agents are taking phone orders, app orders and car orders, and that's where the next round of competition is.
See every finalist
Best Voice AI is one of 12 awards in the Savor AI 50. See all 65 finalists across every category, from kitchen robotics to food safety and AI startups. Winners are revealed Dec. 1 on Savor.fm, Fast Casual Nation and the Paul Barron Podcast.
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