Getty Images | Juj Winn
A friendly female voice greets me on the phone. “Hello, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?”
“Do you have a patio?” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad when she tells me that the Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco unfortunately doesn’t have a patio. But her sadness isn’t the result of a bad day. Her tone is more of a feature, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a new and growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you’ve called a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco recently, chances are you spoke to one of Jasmine’s polite, calculated competitors.
In the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents haven’t gotten as much attention as consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And yet the niche is growing in popularity, with several emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the U.S. This past May, voice-ordering AI garnered a lot of attention at the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. Bodega, the upscale Vietnamese restaurant I called, was using Maitre-D AI, which launched primarily in the Bay Area in 2024. Newo, another new startup, is currently rolling out its software to dozens of Silicon Valley restaurants. Year-old RestoHost now answers calls at 150 restaurants in the Atlanta metro area, and Slang, a voice AI company that pivoted exclusively to restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic and announced a $20 million funding round in 2023, is gaining traction in the New York and Las Vegas markets.
They all offer a similar service: a 24-hour AI phone host who can answer general questions about the restaurant’s dress code, cuisine, seating charts, and food allergy policies. They can also help make, change, or cancel a reservation. In some cases, the agent can connect the caller to an actual human, but only 10 percent of calls result in that, according to RestoHost co-founder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra. Each platform offers restaurant subscriptions that unlock additional features, and some systems can speak multiple languages.
But in the age of Google and Resy, who calls a restaurant anymore? According to some founders of AI voice host startups, plenty of customers do, and for a variety of reasons. “Restaurants get a lot of calls compared to other businesses, especially if they’re popular and take reservations,” says Alex Sambvani, CEO and co-founder of Slang, which currently works with everyone from the Wolfgang Puck restaurant group to Chick-fil-A to fast-casual chain Slutty Vegan. Sambvani estimates that popular establishments get between 800 and 1,000 calls a month. Typical callers include last-minute bookers, tourists and visitors, the elderly, and people running errands while driving.
Matt Ho, owner of Bodega SF, echoes this scenario. “The phones were ringing constantly during service,” he says. “We were getting calls asking basic questions that can be found on our website.” To solve this problem, Ho found Maitre-D to be the best fit after some research. Bodega SF became one of the startup’s first customers in May, and Ho even helped the founders with trial-and-error testing prior to launch. “This platform makes the job easier for the host and doesn’t disturb the guests while they’re enjoying their meal,” he says.
