Amazon’s voice assistant technology

Amazon

Panera Bread is seemingly all-in on implementing emerging technologies at its restaurants. Or maybe it’s just all-in on its partnership with Amazon.

Toward the end of March, the chain became the first national restaurant to use Amazon’s biometric scanning software, Amazon One, rolling out palm scanning for users of the MyPanera loyalty program. Less than two weeks later, Panera announced it had teamed up with Amazon’s Alexa Skills team to offer improved AI-powered voice ordering.

Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant technology, has long powered voice ordering for retailers (including Domino’s and Dunkin’). But the latest update to Amazon’s Food Skills API offers a smoother, more conversational ordering experience, and only recently became possible, thanks to major advances in artificial intelligence.