Getty Photos | Juj Winn
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 might have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds just a little unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–based mostly Vietnamese restaurant does not have outside seating. However her disappointment isn’t the results of her having a foul day. Reasonably, her tone is a characteristic, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a brand new, rising clan: the AI voice restaurant host. In the event you just lately known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are high you might have spoken to one in all 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 present 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 completely 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 supply 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 circumstances, the agent can direct the caller to an precise human, however in accordance with RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, solely 10 % of the calls end in that. Every platform affords the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock extra options, and a number of the methods can communicate a number of languages.
However who even calls a restaurant within the period of Google and Resy? Based on a number of the founders of AI voice host startups, many shoppers 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 standard and take reservations,” says Alex Sambvani, CEO and co-founder of Slang, which at present 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 30 days. Typical callers are typically 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 state of affairs. “The telephones would ring continually all through service,” he says. “We’d obtain requires fundamental questions that may be discovered on our web site.” To unravel this situation, after procuring round, Ho discovered that Maitre-D was the most effective match. Bodega SF grew to become one of many startup’s earliest purchasers 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 friends whereas they’re having fun with their meal,” he says.
