Summary
Summary
- DoorDash’s Text feature lets you order via plain English text; it builds your cart and completes checkout.
- It remembers your ‘usual’—restaurant, dish, mods, extras, and can proactively text recurring orders like coffee.
- Promising shortcut, but misunderstandings and poor recommendations could make it a forgotten or annoying gimmick. If deciding what to order from thousands of options available on an app gives you decision paralysis, DoorDash is now making it even easier by allowing you to order without opening its app at all. In its recent announcement, DoorDash touts its new AI assistant, which allows you to send a text message in plain English to order food and groceries. The Text DoorDash feature then searches local restaurants, builds a cart, and completes checkout once you confirm the order, all without opening the DoorDash app. DoorDash wants to become the friend who already knows your order Text “order my usual” and let the AI handle dinner When ordering online, sometimes you find your thumb scrolling through countless restaurant menus without committing to an order. DoorDash wants to make that process simpler for you by reducing the number of decisions you have to make. DoorDash’s AI assistant can take specific requests or just respond to a general message and recommend something. In your text message, just describe what the vibes are for tonight, set a budget, or explain your dietary preferences, and DoorDash will take care of dinner. DoorDash can also text photos pulled from restaurant listings and suggest an entire cart. For group orders, it can factor in different dietary requirements and portion sizes rather than making one person collect everyone’s request manually. In theory, this should make the group chat feel less chaotic before a boys’ night (or a girls’ night!). What’s more interesting, however, is its memory. According to DoorDash, you can just text “order my usual,” and the assistant will know that it’s time for your Friday-night cheat meal and remember details like the restaurant, dish, modifications, and extras you regularly go for. Also, DoorDash says the assistant can proactively message you about recurring habits. For instance, it can send you a text message in the morning asking whether you want to start your day with your usual coffee order. (As someone who folds under zero pressure, this is so going to exacerbate my already questionable eating habits.) Starting today, iOS users in the United States can join the waitlist for access. It’s an expansion of the Ask DoorDash in-app assistant, which offers similar services. DoorDash has now taken the AI assistant outside the app and allows you to text it. But is it any good? It all sounds nice until it isn’t. These assistants can offer rich features and remove much of the repetitive work involved in shopping, but our previous experience with Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant was hardly convincing. Adding an AI chatbot to a store doesn’t guarantee that its recommendations will be useful or accurate. We’ll have to see whether Text DoorDash becomes a convenient shortcut or another AI feature people try once or twice and forget about altogether. Misunderstood requests, poor recommendations, and other similar problems can quickly turn the supposed convenience into an extra headache, especially when dinner and real money are involved.