It's great to have a place where you have a usual, where they already know what you want when you walk in the door and even start making it. Now, every place can be a place where you have a usual thanks to reordering skills and voice assistants. Recently, Seamless—a food delivery operation—took on that level of customer service by offering a new Alexa skill called Reorder with Seamless.
Reorder with Seamless allows users with Alexa to effectively have a usual at any of the 50,000 restaurants nationwide that work with Seamless, better than one in five of which is located in the Greater New York City Area.
Using the app is easy; all a user needs to do after installing the system is trigger the app with a phrase like “Alexa, tell Seamless I am hungry.” Seamless can then present reorder choices—including that fabled usual—and then place the order accordingly. Estimated delivery time follows.
GrubHub vice president of product—GrubHub is Seamless' parent company—Sudev Balakrishnan noted “We’re always evolving the ordering process to adapt to the ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle of our busy New York diners. The new Alexa skill will delight diners with the added convenience of quickly reordering some of their favorite meals using only their voice.”
This is great for New York diners, but now maybe they can start making it great for everyone else who doesn't live in New York. All great advances have to start somewhere, and this is certainly the place to start it. Granted, the impact of food delivery systems can only go so far until the Federal Aviation Administration finally gets with the program and approves autonomous delivery drones without so many caveats and requirements that the use of such tools is pretty much impossible to do legally. That's going to open up a whole new world (and a lot of new business) as people in completely different cities are able to try food from places they've never been to.
When it's finally ready, though, it will be good to know there are simple tools like Seamless on hand to serve as the infrastructure. Seamless and mobile payment systems can be advantageous with a system like this as they already go hand in hand.
