Global Fast Food Group Transforms Drive-Thru with Real-Time Voice Intelligence with Fireworks

<500ms Transcription. 4X Lower Cost. Up to 5X ROI in Pilot Stores. Scaling to 6,000+ Stores.

Key Outcomes at a Glance:

• 500ms Transcription Latency: Enables real-time upsell prompts to frontline staff.
• 4X More Cost-Efficient than Alternatives: Affordable enough to scale to 6,000+ stores globally.
• 4X Faster Than Leading Models on Live Audio: Supports accurate, on-the-fly recommendations.
• 5–7X Higher Order Value in 100 Pilot Stores: Tangible revenue lift and CSAT from smarter voice prompts.
• From Pilot to 1,000 Stores in Months: Production rollout accelerated with zero infra rebuild.

This household-name QSR brand operates over 6,000 restaurants worldwide and is on a mission to radically transform the drive-thru experience, one of its highest volume and most critical customer touchpoints. Facing intense competitive pressures and evolving consumer expectations, the company’s leadership set a bold goal: to digitize 100% of order-taking over time, enabling faster, smarter, and more personalized interactions.

While the company pursues this ambitious vision, Fireworks currently powers a critical foundational capability — delivering real-time transcription and reasoning that supports smarter, faster drive-thru interactions today. This technology lays the groundwork for more advanced automation in the future.The CEO puts it plainly:

“My point of view is, we can get this business to 100% digital. We should have all of the order-taking done through digital channels over time.”

Achieving this vision requires real-time AI that can understand, reason, and respond instantly across noisy, fast-moving drive-thru environments and scale seamlessly across thousands of locations globally.

Legacy speech systems fell short: high transcription latency, poor accuracy in noisy environments, and prohibitive costs blocked broad deployment. Additionally, stitching together separate ASR, LLM, and TTS tools introduced fragmentation and latency, undermining seamless, live AI-assisted upselling and order personalization.

To deliver real-time intelligence at scale, the team had to overcome four critical blockers:

• Lagging Transcription: >1s latencies made real-time prompts unusable.
• High Costs: Prevented wide-scale rollout.
• Noisy Environments: Hurt transcription accuracy.
• Fragmented Pipelines: Stitching together multiple tools like ASR, LLM, and TTS systems slowed down the process.

The brand needed a single platform delivering low-latency, high-accuracy, real-time transcription and reasoning audio intelligence at scale.

Fireworks delivered a turnkey stack for real-time audio understanding, fine-tuned for QSR conditions:

• 500ms Transcription customized for accents, interruptions, and drive-thru noise
• LLM-Powered Reasoning that generates relevant upsell recommendations instantly
• Optional Text-to-Speech supporting full automation or human-in-the-loop workflows
• Serverless & Dedicated Deployments for real-time performance at scale

The result is an agent that listens, reasons, and acts in milliseconds where it matters most.

Fireworks was discovered organically by an AI researcher on the customer’s team, who was evaluating solutions for real-time transcription and translation. After reading about Fireworks' speed advantages, the team ran a rigorous technical benchmark against OpenAI and Whisper, measuring word error rate (WER), latency, and throughput on real-world audio from drive-thru locations. Fireworks delivered across the board—4X faster, 3-5% better WER accuracy and more scalability during peak hours.

This validation quickly mobilized internal support. The company’s head of digital technology and Chief Digital Officer became strong advocates, aligning behind Fireworks as the foundational platform for voice intelligence across thousands of stores.

Despite the complexity of deploying voice AI into physical restaurant hardware, Fireworks went from proof-of-concept in early February to live deployment in 100 stores by mid-March—proving the platform’s speed, reliability, and enterprise-readiness.

• Challenge: >1s transcription latency unusable, especially in noisy drive-thrus.
• Solution: 500ms transcription fine-tuned for QSR noise, accents, and interruptions.
• Result: Enabled real-time upsells and faster order processing.

• Challenge: Voice AI performance drops during traffic surges.
• Solution: Elastic infrastructure tuned for high-concurrency audio workloads.
• Result: Reliable responsiveness even during peak hours.

• Challenge: High costs blocked global deployment.
• Solution: 4X cost reduction through optimized infra.
• Result: Affordable expansion to thousands of stores.

• Challenge: Disconnected ASR, LLM, and TTS tools caused latency.
• Solution: Single unified stack with end-to-end inference.
• Result: Seamless, single-call API for live in-the-moment recommendations.

✅ <500ms Transcription Latency: Instant speech recognition, even in noisy drive-thrus.

✅ 4X More Cost-Effective: Supports global rollout without blowing budgets compared to prior transcription tools.

✅ 3–5X ROI: Immediate ROI in pilot stores.

✅ From POC to Production in 6 Weeks: Fast rollout to 100 stores in under 2 months, on track to reach 1,000+ by summer.

✅ Infrastructure Ready for 6,000+ Stores: Architected for global scale from day one.

The QSR chain selected Fireworks after direct technical benchmarking against OpenAI and Whisper, confirming superior speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency. Only Fireworks could combine accuracy, cost-efficiency, and sub-second latency in one unified platform.

Today, Fireworks powers their real-time Voice AI stack, enabling faster service, more upsells, and better guest experiences at the drive-thru window.

“We wanted AI that feels invisible to the customer but invaluable to the team. Fireworks made that a reality.” — Project Lead, Voice AI Program, Global QSR Chain

“We needed real-time transcription to make every drive-thru interaction smarter—for both the guest and our team. Fireworks delivered incredible speed, accuracy, and scale with zero friction.” — Digital Tech Lead, Global QSR Chain

The QSR plans to expand Fireworks AI capabilities into voice agents and advanced analytics dashboards, aiming to roll out across all 6,000+ locations by next year—solidifying a digital-first future for their drive-thru operations.