A pleasant female voice greeted me on the phone. “Hello, I’m Jasmine, Bodega’s assistant,” the voice says. “How can I help?”
“Do you have patio seating?” I ask. Jasmine sounded a little sad when she told me that, unfortunately, the San Francisco-based Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t because she had a bad day. Rather, her tone is a characteristic and a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a new and growing clan, the AI Voice Restaurant Hosts. If you called a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco recently, there’s a good chance you spoke with one of Jasmine’s polite and calculating competitors.
In a sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents have received less attention than consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. But the niche market is heating up, with multiple emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the country. Last May, voice ordering AI attracted a lot of attention at the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. The upscale Vietnamese restaurant I called, Bodega, was using Maitre-D AI, which launched in 2024 primarily in the Bay Area. Another new startup, Newo, is currently rolling out its software to a number of restaurants in Silicon Valley. One-year-old RestoHost currently answers calls at 150 restaurants in metro Atlanta and began focusing solely on restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic, with plans to raise $20 million in 2023. Slang, the voice AI company that announced funding, is profitable. We are expanding into the New York and Las Vegas markets.
All restaurants offer similar services. AI phone hosts are available 24 hours a day to answer general questions about the restaurant’s dress code, cuisine, seating arrangements, and food allergy policies. We can also assist you in making, changing, and canceling reservations. In some cases, agents can direct callers to a real person, but RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra says that only 10% of calls end up like that. that’s right. Each platform offers restaurant subscription tiers that give you access to additional features, and some systems can speak multiple languages.
But in the age of Google and Resy, would anyone call a restaurant? According to some of the founders of AI voice hosting startups, many customers are doing so for a variety of reasons. “Restaurants receive a high volume of calls compared to other businesses, especially those that are popular and take reservations,” says the company, which currently works with everyone from Wolfgang Puck Restaurant Group to Chick-fil-A. says Alex Sambvani, CEO and co-founder of Slang. -To fast casual chain Slutty Vegan. Sambani estimates the high-demand facility receives 800 to 1,000 calls each month. Typical callers tend to be people with last-minute reservations, tourists or visitors, the elderly, or people running errands while driving.
Matt Ho, owner of Bodega SF, confirms this scenario. “The phone kept ringing the entire time we were in service,” he says. “A basic question call is posted on our website.” To solve this problem, Ho did some research and found that Maitre-D was the best choice. Bodega SF became one of the startup’s early customers in May, and Ho also helped the founders with trial-and-error testing before launch. “This platform makes the host’s job easier and keeps guests out of the way while they enjoy their meal,” he says.
