Whenever you name a restaurant, you is likely to be chatting with an AI host

A nice feminine voice greets me over the telephone. “Hello, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I assist?”

“Do you could have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds just a little unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–primarily based Vietnamese restaurant does not have outside seating. However her unhappiness isn’t the results of her having a nasty day. Relatively, her tone is a function, a setting.

Jasmine is a member of a brand new, rising clan: the AI voice restaurant host. In the event you lately known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, likelihood is you could have spoken to one among Jasmine’s well mannered, calculated rivals.  

Within the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality telephone brokers haven’t been getting as a lot consideration as consumer-based generative AI instruments like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And but, the area of interest is heating up, with a number of rising startups vying for restaurant accounts throughout the US. Final Could, voice-ordering AI garnered much attention on the Nationwide Restaurant Affiliation’s annual meals present. Bodega, the high-end Vietnamese restaurant I known as, used Maitre-D AI, which launched primarily within the Bay Space in 2024. Newo, one other new startup, is at the moment rolling its software program out at quite a few Silicon Valley eating places. One-year-old RestoHost is now answering calls at 150 eating places within the Atlanta metro space, and Slang, a voice AI firm that began specializing in eating places solely through the COVID-19 pandemic and announced a $20 million funding spherical in 2023, is gaining floor within the New York and Las Vegas markets.

All of them provide an identical service: an around-the-clock AI telephone host that may reply generic questions concerning the restaurant’s gown code, delicacies, seating preparations, and meals allergy insurance policies. They’ll additionally help with making, altering, or canceling a reservation. In some instances, the agent can direct the caller to an precise human, however in line with RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, solely 10 p.c of the calls lead to that. Every platform presents the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock extra options, and a few of the techniques can converse a number of languages.

However who even calls a restaurant within the period of Google and Resy? In keeping with a few of the founders of AI voice host startups, many purchasers do, and for varied causes. “Eating places get a excessive quantity of telephone calls in comparison with different companies, particularly in the event that they’re well-liked and take reservations,” says Alex Sambvani, CEO and co-founder of Slang, which at the moment works with everybody from the Wolfgang Puck restaurant group to Chick-fil-A to the fast-casual chain Slutty Vegan. Sambvani estimates that in-demand institutions obtain between 800 and 1,000 calls per thirty days. Typical callers are usually last-minute bookers, vacationers and guests, older individuals, and people who do their errands whereas driving.

Matt Ho, the proprietor of Bodega SF, confirms this situation. “The telephones would ring always all through service,” he says. “We’d obtain requires primary questions that may be discovered on our web site.” To unravel this difficulty, after buying round, Ho discovered that Maitre-D was the very best match. Bodega SF grew to become one of many startup’s earliest shoppers in Could, and Ho even helped the founders with trial and error testing previous to launch. “This platform makes the job simpler for the host and doesn’t disturb company whereas they’re having fun with their meal,” he says.