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If you live in Australia or New Zealand, you now have a few ways to order a Domino’s pizza using a smartphone: by conventional person-to-person by voice, by chat conversation or by conversing with a virtual-assistant bot. Take your pick.
The bot might not be able to converse about traffic conditions that might affect delivery times, but it will get business done quickly.
Nuance Communications, best known for its Dragon voice-recognition and transcription software, on March 1 revealed that it has partnered with Domino’s Pizza Enterprises in becoming the first enterprise in Australia and New Zealand to deploy Nuance’s multi-channel virtual assistant, called DRU Assist.
No question that this will be on the way to the States soon.
DRU Assist, which runs on Nuance’s Nina virtual assistant engine, uses conversational artificial intelligence to perform customer service on both Domino’s mobile app and online ordering website.
Powered by Nuance’s Nina bot engine, Domino’s DRU Assist engages with customers in human-like conversation via text or speech recognition, enabling customers to place their orders efficiently. Beyond ordering, DRU Assist can converse with the customer about menus, ingredients, store locations and operating hours. Traffic, however, is out of reach at this point.
DRU Assist also has a social identity, because it engages customers with a personality tailored to the Domino’s brand.
DRU Assist uses conversational AI to deliver faster results compared to conventional point-and-click interfaces used in online-ordering websites. At the same time, Nuance contends, it builds a closer connection to the customer.