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The Amazon Echo’s voice-operated personal assistant, Alexa, is capable of quite a bit, including playing music, setting up your schedule, and even doing math for you. Now the company has unveiled a new Alexa feature that people have been waiting for: food delivery.
According to The Verge, Alexa can now order food for you just by following your vocal commands. The food comes directly from Amazon Restaurants (Amazon’s food delivery service), so it will only be available in 20 select cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Miami. But before you dream about a world where pizzas come to your front door at the sound of your voice, you should know that Alexa’s new voice-ordering service is limited. Very limited, actually.
Not only is the service limited to Amazon Restaurants in the cities where it’s offered, but there are two other big exceptions: First, you have to be an Amazon Prime member to use the service. Secondly, you can’t order any new meals on the service; you can only reorder meals you have already gotten from Amazon Restaurants in the past. Amazon gave a rundown of how this all works:
Prime members can ask Alexa to reorder from Amazon Restaurants by saying a restaurant name or cuisine type, for example, “Alexa, order sushi from Amazon Restaurants.” The service pulls a customer’s order history from a specified restaurant or cuisine type and lists meal options available for reorder. The selected meal is then sent for delivery to a customer’s default address.
The voice ordering system obviously still has to be improved, but as people start integrating Alexa into their lives more and more, expect this food service to rapidly expand.
[h/t The Verge]
January 6, 2017 – 12:30pm