Captain D’s is deploying Presto Phoenix to handle drive-thru orders at its 525 locations. The system not only takes orders but also nudges guests with upsells and, eventually, loyalty enrollment prompts.By Lea Mira, RTN staff writer – 9.28.2025
Two seafood chains are taking the plunge into artificial intelligence. Red Lobster and Captain D’s each announced this week that they plan to use AI to take orders, Red Lobster over the phone and Captain D’s in the drive-thru. They are the latest brands to test automation in a bid to improve efficiency and drive sales, underscoring both the promise and the unresolved questions around restaurant voice AI.
Red Lobster, still working to stabilize its business after bankruptcy, is partnering with SoundHound to automate its phone lines across roughly 500 locations. The system is trained on the casual-dining chain’s menu, can process orders and answer customer questions, and is always available even when staff are too busy to pick up. The chain says customers can still request to be transferred to a human if they prefer. Beyond the convenience factor, the move signals how critical off-premise sales have become in casual dining. Calls that once rang unanswered now represent revenue streams too important to leave to chance.
Captain D’s, meanwhile, is deploying Presto Phoenix to handle drive-thru orders at its 525 locations. The system not only takes orders but also nudges guests with upsells and, eventually, loyalty enrollment prompts. CIO Sean McAnally said at the FSTEC conference that AI’s ability to consistently pitch loyalty signups and, down the line, recognize repeat customers for personalized offers could be transformational. In theory, that means a drive-thru interaction could evolve from a transaction into a targeted marketing touchpoint.
These announcements come as voice AI adoption in restaurants is entering a second, more serious wave. Early pilots by giants like McDonald’s showed how quickly accuracy issues could derail ambitious projects. Many customers, particularly older demographics, were turned off by robotic or error-prone interactions. That reality was acknowledged at FSTEC, where Long John Silver’s noted that its core guests often disliked voice automation. Yet proponents argue the upside is too big to ignore: faster throughput, consistent upselling, and labor savings at a time when margins are thin.
This is where newer entrants like Vox AI are making their case. The Amsterdam-based startup just raised $8.7 million in seed funding, bringing its total to $10 million, to expand its autonomous voice platform designed specifically for quick-service restaurants. Unlike earlier systems adapted from general-purpose voice assistants, Vox AI was built from the ground up to handle noisy, chaotic drive-thru environments. Its training pipeline replicates natural cadence and self-optimizes in the field, learning local accents, slang, and even acoustic quirks. The company claims autonomy at scale, with no human oversight required, and supports more than 90 languages—all while plugging directly into existing POS systems without new hardware. For operators, the pitch is hard to ignore: up to 17x ROI through shorter queues, higher upsells, and redeployed labor.
The competitive landscape is crowded. ConverseNow, Kea, SoundHound, Presto and newer players like Loman AI, which last month closed a $3.5 million funding round, are carving out niches in phone, drive-thru, or multi-channel ordering. Some are focusing narrowly, like Loman with phone ordering, while others are positioning voice as the primary interface for the trillion-dollar QSR sector. What differentiates Vox AI is its drive-thru-first strategy and claim of true autonomy—betting that noise-adaptive modeling and multilingual fluency will overcome the problems that doomed past efforts.
For Red Lobster and Captain D’s, their latest moves may look incremental compared with Vox AI’s more audacious vision. But together, these stories reflect the same reality: restaurants cannot afford to let customers slip away in a missed call or a long drive-thru line. Voice AI is becoming not just a tech experiment but a frontline operational tool. The stakes are high. If this new generation of solutions can finally balance accuracy, guest acceptance, and measurable ROI, the way customers order seafood or anything else could be transformed. If not, operators risk sinking more resources into technology that guests ultimately reject.
Quick-service burger chains, coffee giants, and fast-casual players are all facing the same pressures: labor costs, customer impatience, and digital competitors raising the bar on convenience. Voice AI promises to address those pain points, but the winners will be the brands that deploy it with precision, integrate it deeply into operations, and adapt it to their unique guest base. The next few years will determine whether voice becomes the standard interface for ordering food or another cautionary tale in the restaurant industry’s long history of overhyped technology.
