Getty Photos | Juj Winn
A pleasing 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’ve gotten patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a bit unhappy as she tells me that sadly, the San Francisco–based mostly Vietnamese restaurant would not have out of doors seating. However her unhappiness isn’t the results of her having a nasty day. Slightly, her tone is a characteristic, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a brand new, rising clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you happen to lately known as up a restaurant in New York Metropolis, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, likelihood is you’ve gotten spoken to considered one of Jasmine’s well mannered, calculated opponents.
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 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 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 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 supply the same service: an around-the-clock AI telephone host that may reply generic questions concerning 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 end in that. Every platform presents the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock extra 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 keeping with among the founders of AI voice host startups, many purchasers do, and for numerous causes. “Eating places get a excessive quantity of telephone 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 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 thirty days. Typical callers are typically last-minute bookers, vacationers and guests, older folks, and people who do their errands whereas driving.
Matt Ho, the proprietor of Bodega SF, confirms this state of affairs. “The telephones would ring continuously all through service,” he says. “We might 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 one of the 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 visitors whereas they’re having fun with their meal,” he says.