Inbound
Reservations and changes
Books, moves and cancels against live availability, and offers the nearest real alternatives when the slot is gone. Your reservation system sends its usual confirmation.
Systems the agent works in: Reservation book
Every call answered on the busiest night of the week
When the dining room is full, the phone is the first thing to go unanswered. VoiceRun agents take reservation, waitlist and large-party calls on the first ring, write straight into your reservation book, and bring in a host only when a host is what the caller needs. In the caller’s language, at every location.
Built for operations, guest experience and technology leaders at multi-unit restaurant groups and the platforms that serve them.
Reservations line
Fri 6:48 PM$1.55T
in projected U.S. restaurant industry sales for 2026
National Restaurant Association, State of the Industry, 202615.8M
people working in U.S. restaurants, and most of them are on the floor when the phone rings
National Restaurant Association, State of the Industry, 2026135%
annualized hourly staff turnover at limited-service restaurants, so the phone policy is re-taught constantly
Black Box Intelligence via FER, Q3 2024The calls
The calls a restaurant group actually gets
Most are routine, all of them are urgent to the caller, and they arrive when your team has the least time to answer. Each of these runs as code against the systems your hosts already use.
Inbound
Waitlist and wait times
Quotes the wait the floor is actually running and adds the caller to the same list your hosts are working from.
Systems the agent works in: Waitlist · Table status
Inbound
Large parties and private dining
Qualifies the event (date, headcount, budget, menu needs), explains minimums and deposits, and books time with your events manager with the lead already written up.
Systems the agent works in: Events CRM · Calendar
Inbound
Takeout, catering and order status
Takes or changes orders with modifiers and allergy notes intact, or finds an online order and says when it will be ready.
Systems the agent works in: POS · Online ordering · Menu
Inbound
Menu, allergen and dietary questions
Answers from your actual menu and allergen matrix, location by location. When the data doesn’t say, the agent says so and offers a manager.
Systems the agent works in: Menu · Allergen matrix
Inbound
Hours, directions and policies
Holiday hours, parking, dress code, corkage and accessibility, from one source of truth per location instead of whoever picks up.
Systems the agent works in: Location data
Inbound
Gift cards and loyalty
Checks gift card balances and loyalty points, explains the program, and points callers to where they can buy or reload a card.
Systems the agent works in: Gift card · Loyalty
Outbound
Confirmations and no-show recovery
Confirms tonight’s bookings ahead of service, releases the tables that cancel, and offers them to the waitlist.
Systems the agent works in: Reservation book · Waitlist
Outbound
Feedback and service recovery
Calls back after a rough night, captures what went wrong in the guest’s words, and routes it to the general manager while it can still be fixed.
Systems the agent works in: Guest CRM · Ticketing
Why it's hard
What makes restaurant calls hard
Restaurant calls look simple in a demo. Production is a Friday night: the room is loud, the book is full, and the caller wants a table that doesn’t exist.
The reality
Calls spike in the hour before and during dinner service, exactly when hosts are seating guests and nobody can step away.
How VoiceRun handles it
Agents answer in parallel, so ten calls at 6:45 PM become ten conversations instead of one host juggling a handset. Your hosts go back to the guests in front of them.
Elastic call capacity
Calls spike in the hour before and during dinner service, exactly when hosts are seating guests and nobody can step away.
Agents answer in parallel, so ten calls at 6:45 PM become ten conversations instead of one host juggling a handset. Your hosts go back to the guests in front of them.
Elastic call capacity
Tested before launch
Your worst Friday night, rehearsed in advance
Every rule your hosts follow becomes a scripted caller. Before a release reaches a single guest, simulated callers work through the long tail: the party that’s too big, the allergy the menu data doesn’t cover, the caller who switches languages halfway through.
Simulated callers place real voice calls to the agent, evaluators grade every conversation against what should have happened, and a release that regresses never reaches your callers.
~/restaurants-agentIllustrative
$ vr simulate staging --name friday-rush --wait
- ✓Party of eight asks for 7:30 on a fully booked Friday→ offers the nearest real times, books nothing without a yes
- ✓Switches from English to Spanish mid-booking→ continues in Spanish with every detail captured so far
- ✓Asks whether the curry is safe with a sesame allergy→ allergen data incomplete: says so, offers a manager
- ✓Reads out a phone number over a passing siren→ reads it back and re-asks only the digits it missed
- ✓Wants the patio while a weather hold is in effect→ explains the hold, offers indoor seating or a callback
- ✓Asks about a private room for forty next month→ captures date, headcount and budget, books the events manager
- ✓Cancels tonight’s 8:00 inside the cancellation window→ reads the policy verbatim, releases the table to the waitlist
7/7 simulated calls passed · evaluator: judge
The platform
One platform for every location’s phone
Start with the reservation line and grow into the whole guest phone experience, on one platform and one call record.
Your systems
The systems a reservation call touches
The agent checks availability and writes bookings in the same systems your hosts use, so there is never a second book to reconcile at the end of the night.
Reservation book
Reads live availability and holds, writes bookings and guest notes, releases cancelled tables.
Common Resy, SevenRooms, Tock, Yelp Guest Manager
POS & ordering
Finds orders and ready times, and takes phone orders with modifiers and allergy notes intact.
Common Toast, Square, Oracle Simphony, NCR Aloha
Menu & allergens
Answers menu and allergen questions per location from the data your culinary team maintains.
Guest CRM & loyalty
Recognizes regulars and their preferences, checks points and gift card balances.
Common SevenRooms, Paytronix, PAR Punchh
Telephony
Keeps your numbers and carrier, and hands calls to a host or a central reservations team.
Common Twilio, Telnyx, Bring your own carrier
Named products are examples of what’s common in each category; none of them is a prebuilt connector. VoiceRun agents call any API or database your team exposes, and every connection is code your team can read. Your carrier, numbers and contact center stay where they are.
Control
Hospitality, without improvising
Your brand’s voice is a design decision. The agent says what your code allows it to say, and nothing reaches your systems that your code didn’t allow.
Policies, word for word
Deposits, cancellation windows and private dining minimums are read from configuration, the same way every time, at every location.
Allergy answers by rule
Allergen responses come from your data, never from the model’s general knowledge, and anything the data doesn’t cover goes to a manager.
Card details stay off the call
When a booking needs a deposit, the agent hands off to your existing payment system, so card numbers stay out of the conversation and the transcript.
Disclosure in the greeting
Recording and AI disclosures are part of the greeting your team approves, in every language the line supports.
Escalation you define
VIPs, complaints, press, and anything the agent is unsure about go to the person you name, with the context already captured.
Every call on the record
The transcript, every system action and the evaluation sit under one call ID, with the recording too when you turn it on, ready when a guest disputes a booking.
Your code remains your code, your data remains your data, and the models we train for you serve only you.
Deployment options: our SOC 2 managed cloud, your VPC, your cloud, or on-premises with VoiceRun Edge, available under enterprise agreement.
In production
A multilingual reservation line, live in five markets
A restaurant-tech company runs its reservation line on VoiceRun, in multiple languages, with agents written in code and models post-trained on its own production calls.
~87%
of calls resolved without a human, across five markets
Same deployment, 30 days of production calls
~1 in 8
calls include a mid-call language switch, handled without a transfer
Same deployment, production calls
1.1s → 150ms
happy-path model latency after fine-tuning on production calls
VoiceRun post-training pipeline
FAQ
Questions restaurant leaders ask us
Will it work with our reservation and POS systems?
VoiceRun agents call any API or database your team exposes, so if your reservation, waitlist or POS system has an API, the agent can read and write it the way your own software would. The connection is code your team can read, and it is tested with simulated callers before the agent takes a live call.
What happens when a caller needs a real person?
The agent transfers to the host stand, a manager or your central reservations team with the details already captured, and the transfer stays on the same call record. You decide the triggers: events, complaints, VIPs, or simply a caller who asks.
Can it handle callers in other languages?
Yes. Speech recognition and voices are chosen per language from the providers that perform best on each, and callers can switch languages mid-call. On one multilingual reservation line running on VoiceRun across five markets, about one call in eight switches language partway through.
How do you keep it from getting allergen or policy answers wrong?
Those answers aren’t generated. They come from your menu, allergen and policy data through code paths your team can read and test, and when the data doesn’t cover a question the agent says so and offers a manager.
Do we have to replace our phone system?
No. Numbers can be provisioned through VoiceRun or brought from your own Twilio or Telnyx account, and you keep your carrier contracts and rates. A transfer to your central team stays on one call record.
How quickly can we go live?
It depends more on your systems than on us. One multilingual reservation line went from API access to its first voice-completed test booking in three days. Most groups start with one location or one line, prove it with simulations and a slice of live traffic, then roll out.
Give the dining room its hosts back
A consultation is a working session on your call mix, your reservation and POS systems, and your busiest night, with the shortest path to a line that answers every call.