AI is answering the phone at dozens of SF restaurants

At Burma Love on Valencia Street, a phone that used to ring dozens of times per shift with patrons calling to inquire about reservations or private events has gone all but silent. 

Until recently, that would have been an ominous sign of a restaurant on life support. But in the case of Burma Love — and a fast-growing list of other San Francisco restaurants — it’s because a human-sounding, AI-powered robot is answering calls instead. 

Burma Love, at its locations on Valencia and in Mint Plaza, and sister restaurant Teakwood in Hayes Valley, are just three of the dozens of local restaurants using the service, dubbed Hostie. Others include standbys like Nisei, China Live, Harborview, Fiorella, and Tacolicious.

The bot can interactively make or update reservations, provide info about opening hours or allergens, and even text callers a link for takeout orders (or, at some restaurants, take to-go orders over the phone). 

“It’s amazing how gracefully it can answer almost all of the questions it gets asked,” said Burma Love manager Kazi Islam. “It’s absolutely mind-blowing.” 

While Islam said he and the team initially felt “squeamish” about offloading phone calls to a robot, the AI host has made the human employees happier by giving them more time to focus on the customers coming through the doors. 

“They are ecstatic that they don’t have to pick up the phone,” he said of his fellow workers. In an added benefit, Burma Love accepts more phone reservations now than it used to, because the AI answers even when the restaurant is closed.  

Kazi and the team chose Hostie because it has more natural-sounding intonations than a competitor that felt “too automated,” he said. While it’s not meant to trick callers into thinking it’s human, the Hostie voice is friendly and can change topics if interrupted. If the bot gets stumped on a question, it will transfer the call to a human. (So, yes, Burma Love’s phones do still occasionally ring.)

Hostie, which has signed on more than 100 restaurant customers between the Bay Area and New York City since it launched early last year, charges customers a monthly fee based on tiers of service. Cofounder Randall Hom said the company has been able to win over San Francisco restaurants in part because the idea bloomed inside one. 

Soon after Hom and his sister Monica started the Nob Hill pizzeria and natural wine bar Back to Back in late 2022, they became overwhelmed with the phone “ringing off the hook,” Hom said. No matter how disruptive the calls became, though, “you have to pick it up, because it’s money on the table,” he said. “I’d be making a salad and then having to answer the phone, and it just bugged me nonstop, because it was always the same questions over and over.”  

A former tech product designer, Hom wondered how advances in natural-sounding AI voice technologies could solve his problem. After reconnecting with a former coworker, Brendan Wood, the duo whipped up a prototype. Its success at Back to Back led Hom to shop the service to other restaurants. 

It got a few early bites, including at Trick Dog and Flour + Water, which became beta testers. The founders connected with one of their main investors — Google’s AI-focused venture fund Gradient — when partner Andrew Brackin called Flour + Water to say he was running late for a reservation and found himself awed by the AI bot that handled his issue. 

Thanks in part to that serendipitous interaction, Hostie has raised $4 million in seed funding from Gradient, with participation from the former CEO of Open Table and former Yelp execs. 

With that cash in hand, Hostie is focused on signing more customers and hiring. Hom plans to rent the company’s first office space, on the ground floor of an airy Pacific Heights home owned by his mom, and hopes to achieve $1 million in annual recurring revenue “as fast as possible.” 

He’s optimistic, he said, because Hostie has seen rapid-fire signups as it expands its set of features, including new voice options (such as  a French voice for the wine bar Amelie and a “vampire” for The Stinking Rose).  

The startup has also had its first bout of controversy. Late last year, friends and relatives of Matthew Ho, the owner of Bodega, started sending him a strange Instagram ad that sought people who’d made a reservation over the phone and let them know they “might be entitled to compensation.” 

Bodega had been using Hostie. Alerted to the situation, Hom and Wood realized their startup could be running afoul of California rules about disclosing whether a call is being transcribed. Now, if you call any Hostie customer, the first thing the bot will tell you is that it’s taking notes. 

Neither Bodega nor Hostie has been contacted by lawyers, according to Ho and Hom. Hostie has since “beefed up” its data privacy compliance, Hom said. 

While Hostie doesn’t explicitly introduce itself as a robot, it will fess up if a user asks and transfer the call if someone says they want to talk to a human instead. Those handovers are rare, though, Hom said. 

What happens more frequently? Robots interacting with robots. Hom said one of Hostie’s chatbots will encounter an automated caller, like Google’s AI reservation service, “every day.”

Sometimes the two AIs will get freaked out, but more often, the robots hum merrily along, handling the drudgery on both sides of the equation. “We’re already in that world,” Hom said with a shrug. “It works.”