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A 14-site US restaurant group uses an AI phone host to take bookings and answer guest questions, and says it coped with a surge of calls at one site.
The group runs Slang.ai, which answers the phone for its restaurants at any hour, takes reservations and answers common guest questions so that front-of-house staff are not pulled away from service to pick up the phone.
The group's director of business development says one restaurant had more than 250 overlapping calls in a single week, which she says would otherwise have meant losing roughly 1,000 covers.
The figures are the company's own, relayed by a newspaper column, and the 1,000 covers is an estimate of lost business rather than a measured result. Callers with allergies, large parties or complaints may still need a person. Recorded or transcribed calls count as personal data under UK GDPR, so tell callers.
Paste into ChatGPT, Claude or another AI assistant and fill in the square brackets.
Write a phone script and a list of answers to common questions for an AI booking assistant at [restaurant name] in [town]. Cover opening hours, [booking rules and party size limits], allergies and when to hand over to a person. Show me the script and the list of handover rules before anything goes live.
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer · Oct 8, 2025. Summarised in our own words; read the original for the full account.
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