Square has added a voice to the self-order kiosk it has sold since 2024. The new Square Kiosk has a 21.5-inch touch screen and an AI that knows the restaurant's menu. It answers questions, suggests items, and handles changes and substitutions, and the customer can switch between talking and tapping at any point.
Why the drive-thru was the hard place
McDonald's ran its AI order taker with IBM in more than 100 restaurants before ending the test in 2024, and the main problem was that it misunderstood people. Taco Bell ran into complaints and pranks in 2025, but it kept going and now runs voice AI in nearly 900 restaurants. Spoken ordering still has a future; the drive-thru is a very hard place to do it.
In a car, the customer speaks to a speaker through an open window, over traffic and an engine. If the AI mishears "no onions", nothing makes the error visible until the food arrives. A kiosk fixes both problems. The customer stands right in front of the microphone, and the cart builds on the screen as they talk. A wrong item is something they see and fix in a second.
That also changes what voice is for. Touch menus are good when you know what you want and bad when you do not: an 80-item menu with sizes, sauces and extras is a maze of screens. Talking is the shortcut through the maze ("something vegetarian, no onions"), and touch is the quick way to confirm the result. Each does the job the other does badly.
What a shop owner gets for the price
The kiosk costs $1,999 plus $99 a month for each device, and needs a Square Plus or Premium plan. In the first year that comes to $3,187. At $15 an hour, that is about five weeks of one counter worker's pay.
It will not replace a cashier outright. What it adds is another register during the rush, when the line is limited by how fast one person can take orders. It also suggests extras based on the time of day and what sells at that location. A person forgets to offer fries on a busy shift; the kiosk offers them every time, in conversation, and customers will notice that they get asked.
The menu becomes the training
The kiosk knows only what the menu tells it. A cashier who is asked whether the sauce has peanuts can walk to the kitchen and check, but a kiosk can answer only from what the owner entered. If the ingredients were never recorded, the answer will be empty or wrong, and an allergy question is the one where a wrong answer costs the most.
So an owner thinking about a kiosk like this has a job to do first. List what is in every item, including sauces and shared fryers. Then, in the first weeks, stand near the kiosk and write down the questions customers ask it. Those questions are the list of things that used to live in the heads of your best staff, and now they have to live in the menu.