Pizza isn't the only thing Amazon's Alexa digital assistant can order for you.
Starbucks announced on Monday Echo owners can now enable the "Starbucks Reorder" skill and, with a voice command, tell Alexa to reorder food and beverages for pickup at a preferred store.
As with Alexa's Domino's Pizza skill, placing an order with Alexa voice commands is simple, but limited. You'll only be able to order your pre-selected "usual" order and have them ready for pickup from one of the 10 most recent stores you've ordered from.
But if you're perfectly OK with ordering your fill of extra pumpkin spice lattes six times a day, then who are we to judge? Just don't go overboard with ordering too much caffeine because it's now so easy to do.
After linking your Starbucks account to the skill, just say: "Alexa, tell Starbucks to start my usual order." Then, select a pickup location and you're good to go. Sure, you could already place orders for pickup using the mobile Starbucks app, but now you don't even need to open your phone.
You can also check your Starbucks balance by saying: "Alexa, tell Starbucks to check my balance."
Starbucks also made good on its promise to launch voice ordering within its iOS app — but only for a "small" group of 1,000 beta users a Starbucks spokesperson told Mashable. Starbucks hopes to roll out voice ordering to all iOS users by the end of summer; Android support is expected to begin in the summer.
"Our team is focused on making sure that Starbucks voice ordering within our app is truly personal and equally important was finding the right partner in Amazon to test and learn from this new capability," Starbucks chief technology officer Gerri Martin-Flickinger said in a press release.
"These initial releases are easy to use providing a direct benefit to customers within their daily routine and we are confident that this is the right next step in creating convenient moments to complement our more immersive formats. We expect to learn a lot from these experiences and to evolve them over time."
UPDATE: Jan. 30, 2017, 3:09 p.m. EST Updated with comment from Starbucks regarding full iOS rollout and Android support.
