Every voicemail is a table at someone else's restaurant. AVA seats them at yours.

Yes — direct API integrations with OpenTable, Resy, SevenRooms, Tock, and Yelp Reservations. She checks live availability for the requested party size, time, and seating preferences. Applies your deposit and credit-card-hold rules. Handles modifications and cancellations. Writes the reservation directly into your platform with guest notes and dietary flags. Your host walks in to a clean book, not a stack of voicemails.

Yes. For takeout calls, AVA walks the guest through your menu (including specials and 86’d items), captures the order with modifiers and special requests, handles tip and payment if you want her to, and pushes the ticket straight into Toast, Square for Restaurants, or Olo. The kitchen sees it identical to any in-house order. Your phone line stays free during the dinner rush.

These are typically your highest-value calls, and the most likely to die in voicemail because they take the longest to handle properly. AVA captures the event date, party size, occasion, dietary needs, budget signal, contact info, and any specific requests, then routes the lead to your events manager with full context within minutes. No more “they called Tuesday, we never followed up.”

For factual allergen questions (“does the bolognese contain dairy?”) AVA answers from the menu data you provide during onboarding. Same data your servers reference. For complex cases (a guest with multiple severe allergies, or asking whether the kitchen can accommodate a specific cross-contamination concern), AVA escalates to a manager. You set the escalation rules; she follows them precisely.

No. AVA picks up the calls your host can’t — during service when they’re seating guests, between shifts, after close, on closed days. Your host keeps doing the human work: greeting guests, managing the floor, handling complex situations, building relationships. AVA covers the call volume that’s currently going to voicemail or worse.

She sounds warm, present, and like your restaurant. We train her on your voice during onboarding — formal fine-dining tone vs. casual neighborhood spot vs. boutique cocktail bar. Most callers don’t realize they’re talking to AI; the ones who do tend to be pleased they got an instant answer instead of voicemail. You can also choose to have her introduce herself transparently if you prefer.

AVA greets each guest in English or Spanish, matching their language so a reservation or catering call never stalls at hello. Additional languages available on request. In bilingual markets, that’s reservations you’d otherwise lose the moment a Spanish-speaking guest reaches a voicemail in a language they don’t use.

AVA never holds raw card data. When she takes a deposit or credit-card hold for a reservation or a takeout payment, the card goes straight through your existing tokenized payment path (Toast, Square, Stripe Terminal, your reservation platform’s processor) — same flow your host would trigger, never stored on AVA’s side. Call recordings and transcripts are owned by your restaurant, retained on a policy you set during onboarding (default: 30 days), and deletable on request. Guest PII follows the same handling rules as your reservation platform’s CRM.

Most restaurants are live in 7 days. We recommend 1-2 weeks of setup runway: importing your menu, configuring your reservation policies, mapping escalation rules, and integrating with your reservation platform and POS. After that, AVA goes live on overflow, after-hours, or full coverage — your call.