[smeej]

The example of "fast food drive-thru" really cleared this up for me.

Frankly I'm surprised there isn't already some sort of NFC info transfer system in fast food restaurants' apps that lets you and everyone in your car enter your order while you're waiting in line, then knows when your car is up and brings you the food. Have the voice part be a fallback tier, not the primary one.

My grocery store can know when I'm arriving and bring out my food, based on location services on my phone. So can Walmart or Home Depot. Granted, they make me wait a couple hours until they notify me that my order is "ready" before I come get it.

I suppose it's possible this does exist and I just haven't seen it because I don't drive through fast food restaurants, but I don't get why a place that primarily takes orders in real time and hands them out the window can't broaden the way to submit them to include on-site online orders as well as "talk to our agent over a glorified walkie talkie" orders.

[yuppiepuppie]

Sort of related, but I just came off a RyanAir flight of all things, and they have something similar. Instead of talking a stewardess to get a sandwich, I order it on the app and they bring it to me.

It worked quite well, and surprising coming from RyanAir.

[vladsanchez]

It's been a dream of mine for some years now. They're pretty dumb still today.