With Delivery.com and Kip, groups can vote on where to go for lunch

Team shopping chatbot Kip now takes group food deliveries for lunch, and will even take over that tiresome daily ritual of collecting lunch orders from colleagues.

Kip does purchasing for offices, families, and other groups on Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Slack. Kip currently helps facilitate group shopping for 500 businesses and 60,000 users.

For its new lunch offering, the bot works with Delivery.com to send direct messages to team members and gather food suggestions. Everyone gets to vote on what they want for lunch, and a match is chosen based on voting results. Then everyone gets a menu and picks.

The lunch delivery option fulfills a commitment co-creator Rachel Law made to Kip users in July.

Several commercial bouts have played out in the chat space in 2016, known as the year of conversational commerce, and it’s clear that startups and chat platforms put a high value on food delivery and restaurant reservations.

OpenTable has been particularly active, with support for making group restaurant reservations using Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. One of the first demonstrations of Google Home the public saw, for example, was an OpenTable reservation.

Independent intelligent assistant Ozlo got its start with restaurant recommendations.

DoorDash, which raised $120 million in a third round of funding this spring, is one of the few food delivery options available on iMessage.

The Allset Facebook Messenger bot gives users the option to preorder fast-casual or high-end meals so 100 or more can eat lunch within five minutes of arrival at a restaurant.

Meanwhile, Taco Bell still appears to be working on its TacoBot for Slack.