Square’s new kiosk lets you talk to AI for help with your order
The Verge Jay Peters
Square has a new ordering kiosk with a touchscreen and AI voice help. It’s meant to take orders like staff do, including questions and changes.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Jay Peters — read the original for the full story.
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Square is pushing further into the self-service order box business, but with a twist: the new Square Kiosk talks back. It’s a large, pill-shaped terminal built for ordering, and Square says it combines a touchscreen with an AI voice layer that can handle customer requests in real time.
The company is pitching the system as something that understands a seller’s menu and lets people order more naturally, the way they might speak to a cashier. That means customers can ask questions, request substitutions, and make modifications without poking through endless menu screens first. The point is less “tap through a flow” and more “say what you want.”
Square also says the kiosk uses presence detection, so it can greet people as they walk up. The screen itself is 21.5 inches, which gives the machine a fairly large face for a device that’s supposed to disappear into the ordering process.
This is a straightforward hardware announcement on paper, but the interesting part is Square’s bet on voice as the interface layer for food ordering. Plenty of kiosks already ask customers to do the work; Square wants this one to sound a little more human while it does it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
AI kiosks make sense right up until they start pretending to be hospitality. A machine that can take substitutions is useful; a machine that thinks it’s your server is mostly theatre with a touchscreen. The bigger story is not the voice trick, but how quickly companies are using AI to dress up old self-service systems as something smarter.
Read more about this at: The Verge