The 8 best AI phone answering services for restaurants in 2026 range from $19 per month (AskSiya Starter) to $599 per month (Slang.ai Premium), and the right pick depends on whether your line is dominated by orders, reservations, or questions. Yes, our own product is on this list - at number 3, with its flaws printed in full.
The numbers below are groupings, not a quality ranking: order-takers first (1 to 3), reservation specialists next (4 and 5), generalists (6 and 7), then the human option (8). Within each group we lead with the deepest integration, which is why our own product is not first.
Answering is table stakes. We looked at whether the AI completes the order or booking, or takes a message about it for a human to redo later.
Published prices, checked against each vendor's own page in July 2026 and linked below. Where a vendor hides pricing, we say so and flag reported figures as reports.
Every service below has a real weakness - ours included. Any roundup where the publisher's product has no cons section is an ad, not a review.
| Service | Starting price | Completes food orders | POS push | Reservations | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loman AI | Not published; approx $199/mo reported | Yes, with payment | Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, Aloha | Yes, incl. OpenTable | Not published |
| Kea | $450/mo, unlimited calls | Yes, with payment | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, others | No focus | Not published |
| AskSiya | $19/mo (60 min) | Yes, tax read-back | No; dashboard and print tickets | No | 100+, mid-call switching |
| Slang.ai | $399/mo per location | No, hands off to online ordering | No | OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, Fishbowl | Bilingual add-on $99/mo |
| RestoHost | $299/mo per location | Partial: to-go via SMS links | Toast, Clover | Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms | Multilingual |
| Goodcall | $79/mo per agent, unlimited minutes | No | No | Via logic flows | Not published |
| Dialzara | $29/mo (60 min) | No | No | Appointment booking | English and Spanish |
| Human answering service | Typically $1 to $2 per minute | Varies | Varies | Varies | Depends on staffing |
Published prices verified on vendor pages in July 2026; "reported" figures are third-party and unconfirmed. Vendor accuracy claims are self-reported.
These three complete a food order on the phone. If missed orders are your bleeding, start here.
Loman AI has the deepest order pipeline in the category: its Premium plan takes complete takeout and delivery orders, captures payment on the call, and injects the paid ticket into Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, or Aloha, with out-of-stock syncing, dynamic upselling, and OpenTable reservations on top. For a kitchen that lives in POS tickets, nothing else on this list matches it. The trade-off: no published pricing - third-party sources report around $199 per month plus a $149 setup fee as of July 2026, so budget after a sales call, not before.
Kea charges $450 per month for unlimited calls with no per-order fees, takes orders straight into more than 11 POS systems (Toast, Square, Clover, Olo among them), and processes payments including Apple Pay and Google Pay. It advertises a 99.3% order accuracy rate - a self-reported figure, like all vendor accuracy claims, but the product has real volume behind it. The trade-off is the flat price: at low call volume, $450 is hard to justify when metered plans exist for a tenth of that.
Our product, so read this entry with that in mind. AskSiya starts at $19 per month for 60 minutes ($79 for 200, $199 for 600; annual billing gives 2 months free) and every plan is the full product: complete order-taking with options and tax read-back, a live kitchen order board with print tickets, 100+ languages with automatic mid-call switching, repeat-caller memory, learned menu vocabulary with owner approval, transfer routing to 5 labeled numbers, 5 team logins, a website call widget, spam screening, full transcripts, and a monthly ROI receipt. Plans auto-upgrade at 110% usage so callers never hit a wall, and it is the only service in this roundup that also books hotel and motel rooms against live inventory.
The cons, in plain text: no POS integration yet - orders land on the dashboard and printer, not inside Toast or Square, where Loman and Kea are clearly ahead. No payment capture on calls. No table reservation or appointment product. SMS alerts are pending carrier registration. And AskSiya launched in 2026, so there are no public reviews yet - the 7-day no-card trial is deliberately the proof. See the restaurant tour or the head-to-head with Loman AI.
These two treat the phone as a host stand. Neither completes a food order on the call - and for a booked-out dining room, that can be exactly right.
Slang.ai is the category's premium name for a reason: the deepest reservation integrations available (OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, Fishbowl), the most polished voice experience we have heard, VIP and special-request handling, and named restaurant groups on its customer list. Core is $399 per month per location and Premium is $599, with bilingual support a $99 per month add-on. The trade-offs: food-order calls are handed to your online ordering link rather than completed, and the per-location price adds up fast for groups. If reservations are your line's job, it earns the money; our full comparison and alternatives list go deeper.
RestoHost covers the same host-stand ground for less: Resy, OpenTable, and SevenRooms reservations (Resy support is a genuine differentiator), multilingual answering out of the box, Toast and Clover connections, and to-go orders handled by texting callers an ordering link. Standard is $299 per month per location, Executive $499. The trade-off: order-taking by SMS link is not order-taking on the call, and the brand has less production track record than Slang.ai.
If your restaurant line is mostly hours, directions, and messages, a generalist at generalist prices may be all you need.
Goodcall offers unlimited minutes and tokens from $79 per month per agent ($129 and $249 tiers add logic flows, team seats, and directory contacts; annual billing takes about 15% off). It meters unique customers instead of minutes - 100 to 500 included, then $0.50 each - which suits high-volume, low-complexity lines. It is not restaurant-specific: no menu handling, no structured order into the kitchen, but as an always-on front line for questions and capture, the price-to-volume ratio is the best here.
Dialzara starts at $29 per month for 60 minutes and runs to $349 for 1,000, with English and Spanish on every plan, appointment booking, lead qualification, CRM and calendar integrations, custom voices, and a 7-day trial. Per-minute overages ($0.35 to $0.48) deserve a look before you commit. Like Goodcall it will answer a restaurant's phone competently but will not carry a menu or take an order. Also worth a look in this class: Zinng, whose $49-for-300-minutes bundle we compare in AskSiya vs Zinng.
Live-operator services typically bill $1 to $2 per minute, so 300 minutes runs roughly $300 to $600 a month. Humans remain unbeatable on empathy, complaints, and the genuinely weird calls, and for some rooms a human voice is part of the brand. The costs are real too: menu knowledge drifts across a pool of operators, rush-hour hold times exist, and the meter runs the same for a wrong number as for a $60 order. The pragmatic pattern we see: AI for the routine 80%, humans - your own staff via transfer, or a service - for the rest.
Tally one week of calls: orders, reservations, questions, junk. The biggest bucket picks your group above. Guessing this is how restaurants end up paying $399 for reservation software on an order-heavy line.
Most vendors here offer a trial or demo. Feed in your real menu or booking rules and call it yourself, in every language your regulars use. Ten test calls tell you more than ten reviews.
Whatever you pick, insist on transcripts and monthly numbers: calls answered, orders or bookings completed, revenue captured. If a service cannot show its work, it is a cost, not an employee.
Published prices run from $19 per month (AskSiya, 60 minutes) through $29 to $249 for generalists like Dialzara, Zinng, and Goodcall, up to $299 to $599 per location for the reservation specialists RestoHost and Slang.ai, and $450 flat for Kea's unlimited-call ordering. Loman AI does not publish pricing (around $199 per month is reported). Human answering services typically bill $1 to $2 per minute. The pricing model matters as much as the number: metered minutes, per-location flat rates, and per-agent unlimited plans suit very different call volumes.
Three on this list do: Loman AI (with payment, pushed into Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, or Aloha), Kea (with payment, into 11+ POS systems, unlimited calls at $450 per month), and AskSiya (options and tax read-back to a live order board and print tickets, from $19 per month, but no POS push yet). RestoHost handles to-go by texting an ordering link. Slang.ai and the generalists hand order calls to online ordering or take a message.
Loman AI advertises Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, and Aloha. Kea advertises 11+ systems including Toast, Square, Clover, and Olo. RestoHost lists Toast and Clover connections. AskSiya has no POS integration yet - orders arrive on its dashboard and printer - and Slang.ai integrates reservation platforms rather than POS ordering. If POS injection is non-negotiable, your shortlist is Loman AI and Kea.
Slang.ai has the deepest coverage: OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, and Fishbowl, from $399 per location per month. RestoHost covers Resy, OpenTable, and SevenRooms from $299. Loman AI includes OpenTable reservations alongside ordering. AskSiya has no reservation product at all - it books hotel and motel rooms, not restaurant tables, which is a different thing.
The category has matured fast, but treat every accuracy number - like Kea's advertised 99.3% - as self-reported. The reliable test is free: most vendors offer trials or demos, so load your real menu, call in your regulars' thickest accents and languages, order something complicated, and read the transcripts. Services that read totals back with tax and show you every transcript make their own errors visible, which is what you want.
For most restaurants it replaces the calls nobody was answering: the dinner-rush overflow, the 9 pm what-time-do-you-close, the order that went to voicemail and then to a competitor. Sensible setups keep humans one transfer away - AskSiya, for example, routes to up to 5 labeled numbers when a caller asks for a person - and use the AI to make sure the phone simply never rings out. Judge it by the monthly numbers: calls answered, orders captured, hours saved.
