'Do you have patio seating,' I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco'based Vietnamese restaurant doesn't have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn't the result of her having a bad day. Rather, her tone is a feature, a setting. Jasmine is a member of a new, growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you recently called up a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are you have spoken to one of Jasmine's polite, calculated competitors. In the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents haven't been getting as much attention as consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And yet, the niche is heating up, with multiple emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the US. Last May, voice ordering AI garnered much attention at the National Restaurant Association's annual food show. Bodega, the high-end Vietnamese restaurant I called, used Maitre-D AI, which...
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