Getty Pictures | Juj Winn
A nice feminine voice greets me over the cellphone. “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 a bit of unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–primarily based Vietnamese restaurant does not have out of doors seating. However her unhappiness isn’t the results of her having a nasty day. Reasonably, 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 not too long ago known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are high you might have spoken to certainly one of Jasmine’s well mannered, calculated rivals.
Within the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality cellphone brokers haven’t been getting as a lot consideration as consumer-based generative AI instruments like Gemini Dwell 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 a lot consideration 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 completely in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and introduced 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 cellphone host that may reply generic questions in regards to the restaurant’s gown code, delicacies, seating preparations, and meals allergy insurance policies. They will additionally help with making, altering, or canceling a reservation. In some instances, the agent can direct the caller to an precise human, however in keeping with RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, solely 10 % of the calls lead to that. Every platform gives 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 response to a few of the founders of AI voice host startups, many purchasers do, and for numerous causes. “Eating places get a excessive quantity of cellphone calls in comparison with different companies, particularly in the event that they’re common 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 monthly. Typical callers are typically last-minute bookers, vacationers and guests, older folks, and those that do their errands whereas driving.
Matt Ho, the proprietor of Bodega SF, confirms this state of affairs. “The telephones would ring always all through service,” he says. “We might obtain requires primary questions that may be discovered on our web site.” To unravel this subject, after procuring round, Ho discovered that Maitre-D was the very best match. Bodega SF turned 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 visitors whereas they’re having fun with their meal,” he says.
