Getty Photos | 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 could have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a bit unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–primarily based Vietnamese restaurant does not have outside seating. However her disappointment isn’t the results of her having a foul day. Fairly, her tone is a function, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a brand new, rising clan: the AI voice restaurant host. Should you not too long ago known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are high you could have spoken to considered one of Jasmine’s well mannered, calculated opponents.
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 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 in the course of 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 analogous service: an around-the-clock AI cellphone host that may reply generic questions concerning the restaurant’s costume code, delicacies, seating preparations, and meals allergy insurance policies. They will additionally help with making, altering, or canceling a reservation. In some circumstances, the agent can direct the caller to an precise human, however in keeping with RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, solely 10 p.c of the calls end in that. Every platform affords the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock further options, and among the methods can converse a number of languages.
However who even calls a restaurant within the period of Google and Resy? In line with among 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 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 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’d obtain requires primary questions that may be discovered on our web site.” To resolve this challenge, after purchasing round, Ho discovered that Maitre-D was the perfect match. Bodega SF turned 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 friends whereas they’re having fun with their meal,” he says.