Checkers AI drive-thru took five years and a hardware program. Your phone line does not have to.

Hi Auto. The Jan 2022 rollout that generated most of the press coverage was framed as Presto Voice, but the underlying conversational AI came from Hi Auto through a partnership with Presto. By Aug 2023, when Checkers and Rally's launched the first-ever Spanish-English auto-detecting voice AI in a QSR drive-thru, Hi Auto is credited as the direct vendor. In April 2025, Hi Auto raised a $15M Series A specifically to scale its QSR drive-thru voice assistant, and Checkers remains the flagship deployment.

350+ locations as of the Aug 2023 BusinessWire announcement. Checkers and Rally's together operate roughly 900 stores, so the AI is live at less than half of them, concentrated in corporate-operated stores. Franchisees had a separate earlier pilot with Valyant AI in 2020 before the chain standardized on Presto/Hi Auto for corporate lanes.

Hi Auto's public numbers for the Checkers deployment are 96%+ order accuracy and 90%+ order completion without human intervention. The Jan 2022 Presto press release quoted 98% completion during a 4-month pilot; the 96%/90% figure is the steady-state number that Hi Auto publishes in its 2025 materials. 'Completion' is the metric that matters more than raw accuracy, because it captures the percentage of orders the AI handles end to end with no human stepping in. Raw accuracy can hit 100% if a human takes every call.

An edge compute box inside the restaurant, a lane-microphone upgrade where the existing mic was degraded, an integration with the restaurant's headset base station so the audio pipeline routes through the AI first, and a data link to the POS and kitchen display. This is a non-trivial physical retrofit per lane. It is why Checkers' rollout is staged at a pace of hundreds of stores per year, not thousands.

The initial Presto Voice pilot ran 4 months before the Jan 2022 announcement of the rollout to 267 stores. The Aug 2023 Spanish-English capability went through a separate 2-month beta at 5 Checkers and Rally's locations before expansion to the 350-store footprint. Every major capability change at Checkers' AI drive-thru has followed the same pattern: small beta, then chain-wide rollout, measured in months and quarters.

Audio cleanliness. A drive-thru microphone has to cope with engine rumble, wind, HVAC, rear-seat passengers, and a speaker box that many operators have not upgraded since the 1990s. Phone audio is already codec-compressed to a narrow band, comes from one caller's handset at a short distance, and has no ambient industrial noise. Speech recognition accuracy on phone audio typically runs 5 to 10 percentage points higher than drive-thru audio using the same underlying model. That means phone AI can hit Checkers-equivalent accuracy without any of the hardware work.

Yes, on the phone channel. An independent QSR cannot justify an edge device in a lane and a Spanish-English ASR project. But almost every independent restaurant has the same underlying business problem Checkers has: customers ordering by voice, too many at once, staff unable to pick up. PieLine solves it on the phone line. The phone number forwards to PieLine, the AI answers, takes the order in natural language, handles modifications and upsells, and posts the cart directly into Clover, Square, Toast, NCR Aloha, or Revel. Same voice-AI outcome, no lane hardware, live the same day.

On a supported POS, most restaurants go live the same day. PieLine's onboarding team handles menu scraping, POS item ID mapping, and rule configuration (hours, zones, minimums). The restaurant owner forwards the phone line to PieLine and opts into call monitoring during the first month while the AI is tuned against their actual menu and their actual callers. This compares to 4 months for the Checkers pilot and 2 months for a new language beta at a Checkers lane.

PieLine is $350/month for up to 1,000 calls, $0.50 per call beyond that, with a money-back guarantee for the first month. Drive-thru AI vendors (Hi Auto, SoundHound, ConverseNow, Presto/OpenCity) generally price per location with hardware, install, and a multi-year contract; public per-unit pricing for large chain deployments is not disclosed, but industry coverage places it well above the phone-AI price band. An independent QSR evaluating Hi Auto, SoundHound, or Presto directly is usually sent to an enterprise sales process they cannot clear.

PieLine supports multilingual phone orders including Spanish and English. The hard part that Hi Auto solved for Checkers was auto-detection on lane audio with engine noise; phone audio makes language detection an easier problem. For restaurants in bilingual markets, this is one of the highest-value phone AI capabilities to evaluate in a demo.

Direct server-to-server integration against each POS's native API. Clover v3, Square v2, Toast partner API, NCR Aloha Cloud, Revel Management Console. 50+ more POS platforms are supported on request through the onboarding team. Orders land on the kitchen display by the time the caller hears their total, with no middleware broker in the path and no tablet on the counter that staff has to re-key.

No. PieLine is a phone-channel voice AI for restaurants. It is not a replacement for a drive-thru deployment like Hi Auto at Checkers. It is the strategically equivalent product for the phone channel, which for most independent and small-chain operators is where the highest-ROI voice AI deployment lives today. If a single-location QSR wants the Checkers outcome without the Checkers program, PieLine is the phone-first path.