10 Best AI Phone Answering for Restaurants of 2026

Maple is built only for restaurants and splits its product into two clear plans. Maple Voice answers every call around the clock, covers hours and FAQs, and transfers callers to staff, for $85 a month billed yearly or $150 monthly. Maple Pro adds what most operators want from an AI host: phone orders taken item by item with modifiers and sent into the POS and kitchen screens, OpenTable bookings that guests can make, change or cancel, payment over the phone and confirmation texts. Pro costs $220 a month billed yearly or $350 monthly. The integrations page lists 16 POS systems, from Toast and Square to Oracle Simphony and NCR Voyix, plus Stream for order management. Maple says most restaurants are live within 24 hours and its team handles the menu and phone setup. The limits are that reservations run through OpenTable only and the drive-thru and kiosk products are still early access.

Slang.ai is the most reservation-focused product in this list. Guests can make, change or cancel bookings by phone on OpenTable, Yelp and SevenRooms, and when the first choice is full, Slang suggests tables at nearby or sister locations. Its Superhost voice handles interruptions and topic changes, offers 20 premium voices, and on Premium detects and switches between 97 languages mid-call. Slang says its prompts come from studying more than 35 million guest calls, and answers are limited to the restaurant's approved information. Follow-up work lands in a Priority Queue sorted by smart tags, with call recordings, summaries, transcripts and real-time alerts for private event inquiries or lost items. Pricing is public but high: Core starts at $399 per location and Premium at $599, both through a quote. For takeout, Slang texts ordering links instead of entering orders into the POS, which matters for counter-service restaurants.

Yelp Host is the easiest start for restaurants already on Yelp. It pulls hours, location and business information from the Yelp page, so the agent arrives pretrained, and then connects to the POS for phone orders and to the booking platform for reservations and waitlist. Yelp says Host runs on full-duplex voice that listens and talks at once, so callers can interrupt, pause to check with their group or change an order mid-sentence. It detects the caller's language automatically and follows a switch mid-call. Phone orders come with a texted payment link and land in the POS, and Yelp states there is no commission and no extra charge for takeout ordering. Pricing is public: free for up to 30 days, then from $249 a month, with bundled pricing for Yelp Guest Manager. The main conditions are a claimed Yelp listing and a dedicated Host number, and Yelp does not list every supported POS on the product page.

Loman is a restaurant phone agent with one of the broadest integration lists here: Toast, SpotOn, Clover, Square, Shift4, Aloha by NCR, Olo and Stream for orders, plus OpenTable and Resy for reservations. Starter covers humanlike call handling, outbound SMS, call transfer, automatic menu updates and up to 50 calls at once. Premium adds what takeout restaurants need: pickup and delivery ordering into the POS, phone reservations, secure payment over the phone, smart guest memory for repeat callers and an upsell engine. Loman takes orders in 55 languages, detects the caller's language and sends the ticket to the POS in English. It says onboarding takes 24 to 48 hours and that its team connects the POS and imports the menu. Loman states there are no per-minute fees, but it publishes no prices, so you need a demo to compare cost with Maple or Yelp Host.

Kea is built for restaurants that run on phone orders. It connects to more than 11 POS systems, including Toast, Square, Clover and Olo, and says a menu can be connected in under 15 minutes with tickets printing straight away. Several AI agents work behind one voice: one checks every order against the menu, which Kea says gives 99.3% accuracy, another tracks 86'd items and suggests substitutions, and a third texts the owner a daily summary of calls and saved revenue. Guests can pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and Kea handles self-delivery and third-party delivery, reservations and waitlists, holiday hours and spam calls. A newer Text AI lets guests order or pay by text. Kea quotes one flat price with unlimited concurrent calls and no per-order fees, but you must submit a form or book a demo to see it. Bulk editing helps brands with 50 or more locations.

Hostie positions itself as a virtual concierge rather than only a phone bot. It brings calls, texts and emails into one place, adds texting from Instagram and Google Maps, and gives staff an operator app to watch conversations live, read transcripts and reply to guests. Essential covers answering and sends links so guests can view menus, book or order online. Premium adds full reservation integrations to book and modify tables, takeout ordering by phone or text, 20 languages and 24/7 support. Hospitality Plus adds cross-booking across a group's restaurants, conversation scoring, event inquiry capture and targeted text marketing. Hostie lists integrations with OpenTable, Resy, Toast and Square among others, and says it answers an average of 85% of questions, with the rest forwarded to a host. It offers a free trial, but no plan shows a price, so cost needs a sales conversation.

RingChef is a smaller, self-serve option aimed at small restaurants and cafes. The Starter plan costs $149 a month and gives a 24/7 receptionist for reservations with 200 minutes of call handling, a basic analytics dashboard and email support. Professional, at $299 a month, adds order taking, full POS integration, 500 minutes, revenue analytics, priority support and custom voice training. Both plans charge $0.60 for each extra minute, and annual billing saves two months. Enterprise adds unlimited minutes, multi-location management and white-label options on quote. RingChef says setup takes 24 hours with no setup fees, you keep your phone number, and the first 14 days carry a full refund guarantee. The trade-offs are metered minutes, which can add up for a busy takeout line, and a pricing page that does not name the POS systems it connects to. It is a younger vendor than most on this list.

Newo.ai sells a general voice AI employee with a restaurant setup that focuses on bookings. On a restaurant call the agent checks the live book, offers times that are actually free and writes the reservation into the table system before the call ends, so the host has nothing to retype. Newo says voice runs straight through rather than via text, the agent stops mid-sentence when a guest keeps talking, and it tracks every promise it makes, such as sending a confirmation or transferring to a manager. Before launch you can read every document the agent has learned. Pricing is usage-based: pay as you go starts at $0 with 50 free units once and $1.75 a unit after, while AI Receptionist costs $299 a month for 200 units. Spam, instant hang-ups and calls that never connect are not billed. The restaurant page does not describe takeout ordering or list POS partners, so it suits reservation-led venues best.

ConverseNow is a voice ordering platform for restaurant brands rather than a host for a single dining room. Its phone order AI takes pickup and delivery orders around the clock, recognizes returning callers and offers their usual order, suggests add-ons and reads the total with tax before confirming. The same platform runs drive-thru ordering, SMS conversations for orders and promotions, and an order injection API for mobile apps and kiosks. Brands can configure tone, persona, upsell logic, coupons and localization, and ConverseNow assigns dedicated engineering and 24-hour live support. It reports more than 2 million conversations and 83,000 labor hours repurposed each month. There is no reservation feature and no published price; onboarding starts with a consultation. That makes it a strong fit for chains with heavy phone ordering and a poor fit for an independent restaurant that mainly books tables.

SoundHound AI sells OASYS, an agentic voice platform used by large chains such as Casey's, Jersey Mike's, White Castle, Torchy's Tacos and Five Guys. The same agents take orders by phone, in the drive-thru and at self-service kiosks, and SoundHound adds SMS, app and in-car voice ordering. Its Polaris speech-to-text model is built to pick out orders through drive-thru noise, accents and overlapping voices, and the agents suggest add-ons and promotions on every order. OASYS connects to existing POS and menu systems, can switch languages on the fly, and includes Employee Assist, which answers staff questions through a headset or tablet. SoundHound reports an 11% revenue increase and up to 32% fewer errors at locations using OASYS. Everything runs through sales, there are no published prices, and the product page does not describe reservations, so it is a chain platform rather than a host for a single restaurant.