Uber's India-based Eats Engg team enables voice order tracking via Alexa

Uber's efforts to make every product on its platform user-intuitive have yielded several innovations over the years from its India-based engineering teams spread across Hyderabad and Bengaluru

Uber Eats’ consumers in the United States can now use their Amazon Echo devices to track the status of their orders. This was made possible by the ride-hailing firm Uber’s Eats Engineering team, based out of Hyderabad. They led the integration of Amazon’s Alexa with the Eats app, now enabling voice-assisted order tracking for eaters. The new voice-activated tracking feature unlocks real-time, hands-free order tracking for Echo users. 
 

“Making the food delivery experience a seamless and reliable one is of paramount importance for Uber Eats,” said Jaiteerth Patwari, Director - Eats Engineering at Uber. “This goal led us to a collaborative exercise on exploring ways to make the Uber Eats Order experience a magical one, the outcome of which ended up in Uber Eats’ integration with Alexa.”
 

With this feature, users also have the option of choosing how they want to receive the updates. For example, Alexa can announce when there is a status change to their order from one or all of their household devices or they can choose to receive an Alexa notification instead wherein the light on their Echo device will change to yellow, and consumers can ask, "Alexa, what's my notification?"
 

Currently, Uber Eats order tracking on Alexa is available on Echo devices in the United States. Amazon is Uber's third partner in the voice-activated space, after announcing partnerships with Google Assistant and Apple's Siri for voice ordering integrations within the last year.
 

With Alexa integration, Uber Eats users will get timely updates on critical points in the delivery process—starting from when the order is being prepared to when the driver is arriving, and when the order is delivered. To get started, one can go to the Voice Assistant settings in the Uber Eats app and turn on the "Track with Alexa" button. Then, after checkout, tap the Alexa button in the Uber app to start tracking orders. 
 

Uber’s efforts to make every product on its platform user-intuitive and user-friendly have yielded several innovations over the years from its India-based engineering teams spread across Hyderabad and Bengaluru. It is harnessing the power of deep tech in helping users track their favourite meals in an instant. 
 

“At Uber, we are relentless in our pursuit to make things convenient for our consumers,” said Patwari.
 

Uber’s India tech story started in 2014 from a bungalow in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad. Here a handful of driven engineers ideated about what the future of technology in the transportation industry would look like over the next decade and beyond. The teams and the company’s tech presence have since grown to two massive tech centres in the country - one in Hyderabad and another in Bengaluru. The India tech teams are now 1,300-member strong, spread across 13 business critical charters.
 

 As an example to show how vital India’s tech centres are for Uber, the fintech teams here have developed systems to track and manage every single dollar coming into the platform across the globe. The product engineering teams based out of Bengaluru designed tech for vital products such as Uber Bus, micro-mobility, Uber Rent, and Uber Lite from scratch.

The Global Scaled Solutions team based out of Hyderabad leads scaling operations for every product and service Uber rolls out across all the 10,000 cities the ridesharing company is present in.