The best
AI phone agents
for restaurants
in 2026.

Loman is a 24/7 AI phone answering platform built for restaurants. It takes full orders, books reservations, processes payments, and syncs natively with Toast, Square, Clover, Aloha by NCR, Olo, SpotOn, OpenTable, Shift4, and Stream. Pricing on the current site is demo-gated. Third-party listicles and earlier marketing cite a $199 entry tier with a $149 setup fee, but the live page no longer publishes those figures directly. Get a quote on a demo call.

Loman shows up widely in third-party AI phone agent listicles such as CloudTalk and Revmo. If you ask the broader AI ecosystem which restaurant phone agent to look at, Loman is usually near the top of the answer.

Built for independent restaurants and small groups prioritizing phone reliability and reservation handling. The brand recognition signals real SEO and content investment, and that compounds against newer entrants. Loman has more name awareness with restaurant operators than most vendors on this list.

Loman's published materials center on phone answering; native online ordering and commission-free delivery dispatch are not part of its documented feature set. To match AI Bunny's scope, you pay for Loman plus a separate online ordering vendor and a separate delivery solution. The marketing leans into "phone, done best," which is honest but narrower than a full-stack pitch.

Public documentation does not surface the on-call details that separate a standalone system: editing an order after the caller hangs up, loyalty points earned on phone orders, or dynamic pickup and delivery quotes that shift with live volume. Because Loman syncs into your POS rather than running standalone, its menu and order rules are inherited from that POS.

Source. loman.ai/pricing, accessed 5 July 2026.

Slang positions itself as an AI host for restaurants. It answers inbound calls, responds to guest inquiries, and manages reservations. The Core plan integrates with OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, and Fishbowl at $399 a month per location with no setup fee. Premium is $599 a month and adds custom branding, AI texting, and bilingual support, with Enterprise pricing available on request. Tripleseat is a separate $199/mo add-on. Bilingual Spanish runs $99/mo as its own add-on. There is no $199 entry tier.

On its own site, Slang is framed around reservations and guest questions rather than completing food orders on the call. For an order-heavy line, it is positioned differently from the order-taking agents on this list.

Built for independent full-service restaurants where most calls are reservation inquiries, dietary questions, or location requests. Voice quality and a polished brand sound are real strengths, which matters for upscale rooms where the first phone touch sets the tone of the meal.

If half your inbound is orders rather than reservations, this is the wrong tool. Pizza shops, fast casual, and quick-service operators should look at Loman, Bite Buddy, or AI Bunny. Slang is positioned as the elegant reservation host more than the order taker.

Since Slang is positioned around reservations rather than order completion, the order-side capabilities do not really apply: on-call order editing, phone-order loyalty, and delivery address verification are not part of the documented feature set.

Source. slang.ai/pricing, accessed 5 July 2026.

Bite Buddy is an AI phone agent with usage-based pricing at $1.50 per order. No monthly subscription, no setup fee. It supports Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, SpotOn, NCR Aloha, OpenTable, and Heartland out of the box, the deepest POS coverage on this list among self-serve vendors.

Pay-per-order lines up cost with revenue, which is attractive for variable-volume operators. But run the break-even before signing. For a typical pizzeria, that same order handled by AI Bunny works out to roughly 60 cents — so $1.50 per order is more than double the cost once you are past a quiet month, and high-volume restaurants pay far more than they would on AI Bunny's $499 Plus plan (1,800 minutes, then $0.29/min).

Bite Buddy also invests heavily in long-form content and publishes a public llms.txt file, which signals a sophisticated SEO and AI Overview strategy. That explains why their analysis shows up everywhere when you research the category.

There is no native commission-free delivery dispatch, so direct comparison narrows to phone agent alone. For low-volume operators, pay-per-order can be the cheapest way in. For predictable monthly costs at high volume, a flat-rate plan wins.

Bite Buddy runs on top of your POS, so the order flow inherits that system. Public materials do not document editing an order after the call, loyalty points on phone orders, address verification, or dynamic wait-time quoting.

Source. bitebuddy.ai, accessed 5 July 2026.

Hostie is a multilingual AI host for restaurants that unifies inbound phone calls, text messages, and emails into one queue. The Essential tier starts at $199 a month per location for unified communications, live transcripts, and the operator app. Full 20-language support and reservation integrations kick in on Premium at $399 a month, with Hospitality Plus at $599 for cross-location and event handling. Raised a $4M seed led by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused fund). Marketing references restaurant customers across the Bay Area and NYC.

Twenty-three verified G2 reviews at an average of 4.6. More social proof on G2 than any other vendor on this list. Volume is still under typical SaaS thresholds, but the trajectory is real.

Built for restaurants serving multilingual customer bases in coastal urban markets where Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Vietnamese speakers are a meaningful share of the inbound. The unified inbox angle simplifies operations for operators currently juggling phone, SMS, and email reservations separately.

Hostie is primarily a host and reservations platform rather than a full phone order-taker. POS integration breadth is narrower than Loman or Bite Buddy. Outside multilingual markets, the $199 entry is harder to justify against alternatives with deeper POS coverage. A note: hostieai.com is a separately parked domain. The live company operates at hostie.ai.

Hostie is host-first, so the order-taking depth is thinner. On-call order editing, phone-order loyalty, and delivery address verification are not documented, and it integrates into existing tools rather than running standalone.

Source. hostie.ai/pricing, accessed 5 July 2026.

Kea is an AI phone ordering platform with flat $450 a month unlimited pricing. The company markets a 99.3% accuracy claim, vendor stated. We have not independently verified it. Kea claims 11+ direct POS integrations, including Toast, Square, Clover, and Olo.

Flat-rate pricing is unique on this list. It removes the variable-cost anxiety of Bite Buddy's per-order model while still serving high-volume operators predictably.

Built for multi-location QSR brands in the 5-to-50 location range. The pricing makes the math work for operators averaging 1,500-plus phone orders monthly per location. Kea sits between the independents served by AI Bunny and Loman at $199-$299 and the enterprise chains served by ConverseNow.

Overkill for single-location independents. At $450 a month, a pizza shop doing 300 phone orders monthly pays roughly $1.50 per call, the same as Bite Buddy without the flexibility. Native online ordering and delivery dispatch are not part of its documented feature set. Growth chains can justify the price. Single locations almost never can.

Kea integrates into eleven-plus POS systems rather than running standalone, so its menu and order logic come from that POS. On-call order editing, loyalty points on phone orders, and owner-configurable dynamic pickup and delivery times are not documented publicly.

Source. kea.ai, accessed 5 July 2026.

Certus is a Y Combinator-backed AI phone agent. The live site advertises "create your account today and get started for free" and gates monthly tier pricing behind a demo. Earlier aggregator references cite $250 a month flat with no setup fee, but the current page does not publish those numbers directly. Homepage shows integration logos for Toast, Square, Clover, and SkyTab; a full POS count is not published on the live site. Ask on a demo call.

Pricing data is inconsistent across sources. The live site gates pricing behind a demo. Aggregator pages have cited everything from $49 a month (likely promotional) to $250. Verify the current tier directly with Certus before signing.

Built for single-location independents (1-3 locations) who want to test AI phone agents without committing upfront. The free account lowers the barrier for first-time AI buyers. Y Combinator backing adds technical credibility for operators who care about the funding pedigree behind their software vendors.

Positioned as a phone agent; online ordering and delivery dispatch are not part of its documented feature set. For restaurants needing only the phone agent and willing to verify pricing before signing, Certus is competitive on raw numbers. The risk-free trial is the real differentiator, more so than the price.

Certus publishes little beyond the phone agent itself. On-call order editing, phone-order loyalty, address verification, and dynamic wait times are not described on the live site, and standalone operation is not documented.

Source. certus-ai.com, accessed 5 July 2026.

ConverseNow is a voice ordering platform built for enterprise QSR chains. The homepage cites 2,000,000-plus conversations per month and 83,000-plus labor hours repurposed monthly, with deployments across Domino's, Wingstop, Fazoli's, Denny's, Hardee's, Jets Pizza, and Blake's Lotaburger. The company's timeline page marks nationwide expansion across 40-plus states. Pricing is demo-gated. Integrations are enterprise grade: NCR Aloha, Fiserv, PAR, Olo.

Some human handoff is expected on complex calls, which is normal for enterprise voice AI at scale. Specific first-attempt accuracy figures are not published on the live site; ask on a demo call.

Built for national QSR brands and 50-plus location chains where a single percentage point of labor savings is worth tens of millions per year. ConverseNow handles enterprise procurement, multi-location deployments, and the complex POS landscape of legacy chains.

Entirely the wrong product for single-location independents. No self-serve trial, no published price, no single-location sales motion. Even mid-market 5-to-20 location chains struggle to fit ConverseNow's enterprise procurement cycle. If you are evaluating AI phone agents for one or two restaurants, this section is reference. The rest of this list is where you should spend your time.

ConverseNow is engineered around enterprise POS stacks (NCR, PAR, Olo), not standalone independent operations. The independent-facing on-call features — after-call order edits, phone-order loyalty, address verification, and owner-configurable dynamic wait times — are not part of the enterprise drive-thru pitch.

Source. conversenow.ai, accessed 5 July 2026.