Presto connects drive-thru voice orders to Toast

Presto has connected its drive-thru voice ordering system to Toast, giving restaurants using both companies a direct route from a spoken order to the kitchen. The September 21 announcement also sets out Presto’s intended audience: emerging and midsize quick-service brands with multiple locations that use Toast.

Presto Voice captures the order, and Toast’s point-of-sale system sends it to the kitchen display system, Restaurant Dive reported. Presto told the outlet that deployment involved a minor integration without substantial new hardware. It also said a Toast customer was already using the connection as of September 21.

Menus and voices came before the Toast connection#

In February 2025, Presto introduced Menu Unification, a product for turning a brand’s varied restaurant menu data into a centralized, structured format. The company described tools to manage multiple locations and menus together, update menu combinations and bring new restaurants onto its voice system.

Those capabilities also shaped what the voice system could suggest during an order. Presto described offers based on the items already selected, the time of day or season, and upgrades such as different proteins, toppings or sides. At the time, the company said it was completing live tests at Yoshinoya and planned to expand the product to other customers.

Presto addressed the voice customers hear in a September 2025 partnership with ElevenLabs. It said it had begun using ElevenLabs’ voices in drive-thrus, with the collaboration covering voice synthesis, quality and analytics. Voice synthesis generates the system’s spoken replies. Co-founder Krishna Gupta described developing products with other AI companies as part of Presto’s strategy.

Toast’s drive-thru work extends beyond order entry#

In an April 14 announcement, Toast presented its drive-thru package as one connected operating environment: POS software, Delphi hardware, digital menu boards, kitchen displays, voice ordering partners and installation support. It planned a rolling launch beginning with brands of 15 or more locations.

The software includes a drive-thru mode for recording vehicle information and lane tags. An order confirmation screen shows guests their orders as they are entered, so they can review them before the order is sent for preparation. Toast also described service-time reporting to identify lane bottlenecks and kitchen-display changes intended to help with assembly and balancing work.

Toast’s launch named Incept AI as a voice ordering partner and said more would follow in 2026. Its Incept setup guide, updated August 28, shows one existing workflow: the agent greets a driver at the speaker, displays the order while the customer speaks and submits the completed order to the POS and kitchen display. Setup includes selecting the restaurant locations to connect, reviewing data-access terms and onboarding with Incept. The guide requires access to Toast Partner Integrations and identifies Incept as the contact for integration support.

Another route through an ordering platform#

A July 23 partnership between Deliverect and SoundHound AI addresses a similar connection. The companies said SoundHound’s ordering agents would use menu and location information from Deliverect, then route orders to kitchen fulfillment through Deliverect’s POS integrations. The announcement covered drive-thru, phone, kiosk and in-car ordering.

Deliverect framed its existing POS connections as a way to avoid building separate integrations market by market. Its approach places an order and menu management platform between the voice provider and restaurant systems. Presto’s Toast announcement describes a direct connection into the POS.