Alexa! Tell KFC that I am very hungry

Food-based retail enterprises managing high customer volume have great news in store for them.  Haptik, the world’s largest conversational AI platform, recently developed a voice bot for the brand offering the world’s tastiest chicken – KFC India – on Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. This means that consumers can now call for their favorite finger lickin’ good KFC and Alexa will make it happen! The two enterprises collaborated to develop the bot for KFC India that will substantially facilitate and accelerate the food ordering process by making it entirely conversational.

The latest KFC Skill developed for Alexa brings consumers closer to their favourite finger lickin’ good chicken, making the order journey extremely easy: right from listing menu options, placing the order, updating on offers, to even amusing users with a chicken joke. The voice bot's smart intent and entity detection engine understands what the user wants and completes the order placement process in a completely automated, short, seamless and convenient manner. Users need to just say “Alexa, launch/Start KFC”, check out the latest items on the menu which including snacks and beverages along with the best offers, place the order and sit back and enjoy their delicious food!

The bot was developed for KFC India as the first-ever Skill for a QSR brand in India. Globally KFC has more than 22,000 locations across 135 countries, and this is the first time the enterprise headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky has started a bot-based order placement service on any virtual assistant.  The KFC Alexa Skill developed by Haptik finds not only the nearest KFC restaurant by fetching the user’s location, it even informs customers of the product-availability in these restaurants on a real-time basis.

In order to make the Skill engaging, fun trivia related to the brand, nuggets on its iconic founder Colonel Sanders’ life, chicken jokes, etc. have been added to the Skill.  Simultaneously, the bot has been trained basis existing knowledge on buyer behavior and customer preferences.

Haptik worked closely with the tech team at KFC India to ensure the backend systems and APIs are designed in a way to support a voice-first platform. The entire user journey was designed keeping voice as the native input. Striving to enhance customer experience, the KFC Skill will also be compatible for images of the menu items being shown on screen-enabled devices soon.

Commenting on the bot, Aakrit Vaish, Co-Founder and CEO, Haptik, said, “It gives us immense pleasure to associate with one of the most recognized QSR brands in the world for a dedicated, one-of-its-kind bot-based Alexa Skill. It was a challenging task given the unique product names on KFC India’s menu. The bot was carefully trained on the key entities and the primary intents a user would express in a food ordering flow. We had a great experience working in tandem with the team at KFC India and hope that the bot further enriches the great gastronomic experience offered by KFC!”

Elaborating on this collaboration Moksh Chopra, Chief Marketing Officer, KFC India said, “Voice recognition is becoming a game changer today, with millennials rapidly embracing and getting comfortable with this new technology. Enabling this functionality with Haptik, we are creating the next-gen eating experience by building on factors like ease of access, digital menus, personalized engagement, etc. The idea is to create a whole new-ordering experience in the QSR category. We are confident that with more and more consumers engaging with these smart speakers, Alexa will give impetus to online ordering.”

Post Alexa, KFC also plans to enable voice ordering from within its own mobile app and website. The multi-channel experience offered by the Alexa Skill makes KFC India the first QSR brand to offer such a 360-degree engagement experience to customers.

Haptik has been leading the charge of India’s AI and chatbot-based revolution. Conversational AI applications developed by Haptik for a diverse array of clients have been winning national and international awards and recently, it was also selected as one of the few esteemed partners for AWS’s  marketplace for Machine Learning at re:Invent 2018.