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AI agent · Voice & ops

Hostline AI Receptionist

Voice AI receptionist that answers calls, books orders, and syncs tickets to the kitchen — 63% of calls handled without staff.

Hostline Kitchen Group · 9 weeks · 2025

Hostline voice AI operations dashboard with live call transcript, order details, and Square POS integration.

Challenge

Peak-hour phone lines overwhelmed three locations. Staff missed calls, orders were transcribed wrong, and callback wait times hurt repeat customers. They needed an agent that sounded on-brand and wrote clean tickets into Square.

Approach

We deployed a Twilio voice stack with structured function calling into menu, inventory, and POS APIs. The agent confirms items, applies modifiers, reads back totals, and texts a payment link. Uncertain utterances route to a Slack queue with call recording and suggested responses.

Timeline

  1. 01

    Menu & policy ingest

    Week 1

    Structured the menu, allergen rules, and holiday hours into a versioned knowledge graph the agent must cite.

    • Menu schema
    • Policy playbook
    • Integration map
  2. 02

    Agent build & POS wiring

    Week 2–4

    Voice flows, Square order creation, SMS receipts, and human handoff with warm transfer.

    • Voice agent v1
    • POS integration
    • Handoff dashboard
  3. 03

    Pilot location

    Week 5–6

    One restaurant, lunch and dinner peaks. Tuned prompts from 400 real call transcripts.

    • Pilot metrics
    • Prompt library
    • QA checklist
  4. 04

    Multi-site rollout

    Week 7–9

    Three locations live with shared analytics, per-store hours, and staff override from an iPad console.

    • Production rollout
    • Staff console
    • Runbooks

Stack

  • Voice

    Twilio Voice, Media streams, OpenAI Realtime API

  • Agent

    Function calling, RAG (menu), Human escalation

  • Integrations

    Square POS, Slack, SendGrid SMS

  • Infra

    Railway, PostgreSQL, Datadog, PagerDuty

“Friday updates, always honest, never padded. I stopped worrying about the project by week two — and that’s worth a lot when you’re running a DTC brand and every week of delay costs real money. Cart abandonment dropped 51%.”

Alice Ncube, COO — Saltbox

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