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 somewhat unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–primarily based Vietnamese restaurant would not have out of doors seating. However her unhappiness isn’t the results of her having a foul day. Fairly, her tone is a characteristic, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a brand new, rising clan: the AI voice restaurant host. In case you not too long ago known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, likelihood is you might have spoken to one in every 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 Stay 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 Might, 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 presently 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 throughout 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 costume 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 based on 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 number of the programs can converse a number of languages.
However who even calls a restaurant within the period of Google and Resy? In response to a number of the founders of AI voice host startups, many shoppers 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 presently 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 usually last-minute bookers, vacationers and guests, older individuals, and those that 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 might obtain requires fundamental questions that may be discovered on our web site.” To unravel this subject, after purchasing round, Ho discovered that Maitre-D was the most effective match. Bodega SF grew to become one of many startup’s earliest purchasers in Might, 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.