Voice-ordering vendor Omilia announced an agreement to continue its Taco Bell rollout on July 7. It reported live systems at more than 890 U.S. restaurants across 38 states. The partnership began in 2023.
The system handles orders at the drive-thru speaker. Omilia says it adapts to each restaurant’s menu, current stock and limited-time offers, including customers changing or customizing an order. Omilia’s deployment announcement
That local information is central to the task. Recognizing a product name is only part of accepting an order; the response also needs to reflect what that restaurant can sell.
The installed count is Omilia’s reported footprint, rather than an independently audited total. The announcement gives no numerical expansion target or completion schedule.
Omilia also cites favorable service-speed and employee-retention comparisons without publishing the sample, controls or calculation methods. Those claims cannot establish how much time or labor an individual restaurant saves.
Yum’s earlier announcement described a broader program#
On July 31, 2024, Yum! Brands said voice AI was operating at more than 100 U.S. Taco Bell drive-thrus in 13 states. It targeted hundreds by that year’s end, following more than two years of testing and refinement. Yum’s 2024 announcement
Yum also described an ambition to bring voice ordering to its brands’ drive-thrus globally. It described collaboration with franchisees and a restaurant technology environment including digital menu boards and its Poseidon point-of-sale system. Integration with the next generation of Taco Bell Rewards was planned for later in 2024.
That account makes the order-taking function part of a larger restaurant workflow. What a guest hears, sees on the menu board and ultimately purchases must connect with the systems used to record the sale.
The same release said five KFC restaurants in Australia were testing voice AI. Those were a different brand and market, with a separate testing status.
The 2024 figures describe Yum’s earlier program, without identifying an Omilia-specific cohort. They cannot establish a growth rate for the vendor’s installations or prove completion of the old year-end target.
NVIDIA’s 500-restaurant target covered several technologies#
A March 18, 2025, NVIDIA announcement described another part of Yum’s technology work. The companies targeted deployment of multiple AI solutions in as many as 500 restaurants during 2025. NVIDIA’s partnership report
Voice ordering was one application. Others included computer vision for drive-thru traffic and software analyzing restaurant performance to produce recommendations for managers. The stated restaurant target covered that broader collection of work across Yum.
The announcement also described voice agents in call centers handling phone-order surges during events such as game days.
NVIDIA said Byte by Yum! developers used its NIM microservices and Riva speech technology to build voice agents in under four months. The announcement identified Amazon EC2 P4d cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 processors as the infrastructure supporting those agents. These were specific technical responsibilities in the NVIDIA collaboration, not specifications assigned to every Taco Bell voice-ordering installation.
For a restaurant operator, the distinction is practical. A customer-facing voice agent, a traffic-analysis tool and management recommendations perform separate jobs, even when grouped under one technology strategy.
QSR Pro Staff
The QSR Pro editorial team covers the quick service restaurant industry with in-depth analysis, data-driven reporting, and operator-first perspective.
More from QSR