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You used to call me on my cell phone, Late night when you need a reservation.
Reading the latest edition of a restaurant tech newsletter about Voice AI, I realized my algorithm might be trapping me in an AI bubble. The article mentioned “Alexa mispronouncing names” as a current concern for Voice AI and described the impact of voice AI as a distant future. Meanwhile, ElevenLabs already produces near-perfect speech synthesis, and Nvidia just released a voice model with zero latency. The gap between what mainstream media covers and what the technology actually does has never been wider.
For restaurants and hospitality operators, Voice AI is more than just launching your restaurant music playlist. It’s a strategic opportunity to recapture direct relationships with customers, and build the kind of rich profiles that enable real personalization.
The Third-Party Problem
If you run a restaurant or hotel, your reservations probably flow through a third-party platform. Resy or OpenTable for restaurants. Booking.com or Expedia for hotels. They’re outrageously expensive, flat fee plus commission per reservation, and they own the online customer relationship by withholding credit card information, email, stay history. You only control what happens on property.
These platforms rose in popularity because they make life easier for restaurants. They handle online promotion and remove the burden of having a dedicated employee managing the reservation book. An easy decision when nobody liked being put on hold for 15 minutes. Outside main hours, reservations would end up on voicemail, and as a guest you were never sure if you’d get in, waiting for a call back. For staff, it was also a safety thing, not hard to imagine angry patrons screaming because they didn’t get the reservation they wanted. Not to mention a luxury in a world experiencing labor shortages and rising operational costs.
Removing your landline has its pros but also its cons. You need to accept losing two key aspects of hospitality: when customers call, it feels more human than filling an online form. The conversation, even brief, allows them to share more detail than anybody would ever type into the Resy app, not knowing if someone will ever read it. You also lose the common courtesy of calling to say you’re running late, or that the table has dropped from six to four. May be a dying art, even if land lines were still open.
Outsourcing your reservation system means losing the triage of who’s coming to your restaurant. Maybe you want to prioritize regulars over reservation scalpers or the group who spends the entire evening sharing a small plate and leaving a bad tip. Some restaurants found a workaround: divide the book in two. Half for the randos on the platforms, the other half for regulars who get a VIP number to call after two successful reservations. Clever, and frankly better.
Why Voice Beats Resy
Voice AI changes the reservation equation. Current systems can hold natural conversations, manage complete booking flows, and connect directly to your table management or property management system. The technology handles availability checks, modifications, and confirmations without human intervention. It has no feelings, no sick days. If an angry customer tries to threaten it, it will calmly answer: “you’re absolutely right.”
Voice is your best ally to build relationships. Asking “Are you celebrating something special?” feels natural, even welcome. People share far more in a conversation than they ever would in form fields.
Don’t worry, not every call needs to be a ten-minute interview. A restaurant doesn’t need a biography. A two-minute conversation captures enough context to personalize an experience, the anniversary dinner, the food allergy, the preference for a quiet table.
The Customer Adoption
LLMs are still expensive to run, and applications are mostly B2B for now. But OpenClaw, the AI assistant that took the internet by storm, shows that more and more users are willing to build and delegate mundane tasks to a third party they own and control. One use case that came up repeatedly: asking OpenClaw to make a restaurant reservation.
The AI agent first checks Resy, but when it notices no tables are available, it goes to Google Maps, finds the phone number, and makes a call. Negotiates for a couple minutes and ends up booking a table for the night. Customers, like restaurants, want a direct relationship so they can control what’s shared and have the opportunity to personalize their next visit. It’s an opportunity for restaurant to embrace this and build direct relationship with their customers.
The technology is ready and isn’t going away. For restaurants, it’s not a question of if, but when they should invest in voice AI. As usual, early adopters will win. Start testing and building around voice AI before a new Resy comes along and steals your reservation line.