Square kiosk with conversational AI, a customer places an order using the touchscreen interface.

Editorial illustration for Square's New Kiosk Uses Conversational AI to Help Customers Place Orders

Square's New Kiosk Uses Conversational AI to Help...

By AI Daily Post Edited by Brian Petersen, Editor-in-Chief

October 14, 2026 • 3 min read

Square wants its new order kiosk to sound less like a vending machine and more like the person behind the counter. The company rolled out the Square Kiosk today, a 21.5-inch touchscreen device shaped like a large pill that lets customers talk through their order instead of just tapping buttons. Presence detection means it greets shoppers as they walk up, and once an order is placed, payment runs through either a contactless reader or a card slot built into the unit.

The bigger shift is what's happening behind that screen. Square built the Kiosk around what it calls an "agentic, conversational voice layer," a system designed to parse a business's full menu and handle requests the way a cashier would, including swaps, add-ons, and questions about what's actually in a dish. For businesses already paying for Square Plus or Premium, the hardware costs $1,999 upfront plus a $99 monthly software fee per device.

The move puts Square squarely in the race to bring voice AI to physical retail and food service counters, where ordering has mostly stayed stuck on static touchscreens despite years of chatbot progress everywhere else.

Square says the Kiosk, which has a large pill shape, has an “agentic, conversational voice layer” that “fully understands a seller’s menu and listens and responds in real time, enabling customers to order the way they’d naturally talk to staff.”

Square’s new kiosk lets you talk to AI for help with your order - The Verge AI

Why this matters

Square is betting that voice is the next interface for physical retail, not just phones and laptops. Folding a conversational layer into hardware that already sits at the register puts AI directly between a business and its revenue, which is a different bar than a chatbot that can fail quietly in a browser tab. If the Kiosk mishears an order or stumbles on a menu with modifiers and allergens, that's a refund, a complaint, or a walkout, not a bad Yelp review about customer service software.

For builders, this is a signal that voice AI vendors are moving past demos into unglamorous, high-volume settings: fast food lines, grocery checkouts, drive-throughs. The real test isn't whether it sounds natural, it's whether it holds up against background noise, regional accents, and a cook who changed the soup special an hour ago. Square hasn't published accuracy numbers or failure rates yet.

Worth watching whether they do, because "fully understands a seller's menu" is the kind of claim that's easy to write in a press release and hard to prove at 1 p.m. on a Saturday.

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Square's New Kiosk Uses Conversational AI to Help...

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