Industry News

Oracle eyes Alexa-style ordering for stadia

Oracle Hospitality has revealed that it is working with the development team at Amazon to establish how the ‘Alexa’ intelligent personal assistant can be used inside its various venues.

Phil Ross, a senior sales engineer at Oracle, revealed the venture last week at the SportTechie State Of The Industry event, telling delegates that the firm hopes to use Alexa technology to allow fans to orders refreshments.

Ross said the technology could be integrated with in-stadia point-of-sale systems so that fans could simply tell the machine what they would like to order, with this message then relayed to the kiosk area where staff can prepare the order.

“Telling Alexa to send another tray of nachos, send another case of beer to your suite, those are the sorts of things that we’re looking to enable because those are things that people use in their daily life already,” Ross said.

“Buying food and beverage is an impulse buy. Whenever they’re ready, we want to be right there ready to transact.”

The Alexa project is just one option that Oracle is looking at to help improve the visitor experience at its venues.

A recent survey by Oracle found that 45 per cent of fans had left a concession line at least once in the last 12 months without making a purchase, due to the amount of time it was taking them to get served.

From this survey, Oracle also found that 56 per cent of respondents would be happy to use a mobile application to place an order and cut down on waiting times.

Image: May Wong