Just Eat brings the AI ​​voice assistant to Italy

The launch represents a strategic step for the company, which is shifting its positioning from a simple transactional marketplace to an AI-powered personal assistant. The stated objective is to counteract so-called choice overload by offering personalized, real-time generated advice on user preferences.

Thanks to generative artificial intelligence models, the system is able to interpret requests formulated in an informal or imprecise way, identifying the customer’s real intent even starting from complex sentences. A request like “I’m craving something spicy for tonight, but not the usual pizza” is translated directly into targeted suggestions, without going through multiple filters. The support of dozens of languages ​​also makes interaction accessible to a wide range of users.

The Italian market shows significant room for improvement on this front: completing an order takes on average 7.8 minutes, during which users consult around 2.63 restaurants and more than four different dishes. Furthermore, 86% of people are undecided between two types of cuisine. It is precisely these numbers that motivate the introduction of the voice tool, whose first results in the United Kingdom indicate an interesting fact: those who use voice commands identify what they are looking for approximately 40% faster than text chat alone, with a 30% higher probability of choosing a dish or restaurant among those recommended, compared to those who resort to manual search.

On the security front, the company claims to have adopted protocols to prevent inappropriate content and to operate in full compliance with the GDPR; the conversations, it is specified, are not archived. The tool also allows you to freely switch between keyboard and voice, an option that the company also presents as an inclusion factor for users with visual impairments or reduced mobility. Planned future developments include hands-free ordering from the car, integration with messaging platforms and gaming consoles.

The initiative is part of the group’s broader technological ecosystem, which in 2025 managed a total of 592 million orders globally and which already supports partner restaurants with targeted advertising tools and delivery time estimates. Daniele Contini, Country Manager of Just Eat Italia, underlined how the real difficulty for users is no longer identifying a restaurant, but deciding what to order, and presented the voice assistant as a direct response to this indecision, designed to allow customers to express their requests in their own words.