Case study
Sous
An AI that answers your restaurant's phone, takes the order and sends it straight to the kitchen printer. Built on FairPlate.
- Status
- In development
- Owner
- Papi Labs Ltd
How it works
A schematic of how Sous works, drawn in the browser.
Summary
- Context
- FairPlate® is the ordering platform Papi Labs runs for restaurants. Web orders reach the kitchen printer on their own. Phone orders are still written down by hand.
- Problem
- A ringing phone pulls someone off the line during service, and what they scribble never reaches the system the rest of the orders live in.
- Constraints
- No new hardware in the kitchen, no change to the way a ticket prints, and a size the caller states is never guessed.
- Approach
- Sous answers the restaurant's phone, takes the order in conversation and puts it into the ordering platform the kitchen already uses.
- What is new
- Matching what a caller says to a live menu is the part that usually fails. Sous checks the order against that restaurant's real menu and asks again rather than guessing.
- Outcome
- Phone orders reach the kitchen the same way web orders do, and nobody has to leave the line to answer the phone.
- Evidence
- A real phone order has run the whole way through, from a customer calling the number to a ticket printing in the kitchen with nobody touching it.
- Status
- In development, running as a supervised pilot.
About Sous
What you give it, and what you get
A restaurant gets its own phone number. All it has to supply is its menu.
A customer calls the number, orders the way they would with staff, and chooses collection. The order goes into the same system as a web order and prints on the kitchen printer the restaurant already has.
Kitchen staff do not learn a new screen, and nobody stops work to answer the phone.
Why it is different
Phone orders usually go wrong in the middle of the call. Someone asks for a large one, or a fourteen inch, and that has to match a real item on the menu.
Sous checks what it heard against the restaurant’s live menu. If a size does not match anything, it asks the caller again. It does not guess.
It needs no new hardware and no second system to watch during service.
Where it stands
Sous is in development and running as a pilot. A real phone order has gone all the way from a customer’s call to a printed kitchen ticket.
For now a person listens back to calls to check accuracy, so the pilot is supervised.