An AI receptionist is software that answers your venue's phone in a real voice, and Skai Solutions is the one built for Australian and New Zealand hospitality, taking orders straight into your POS from A$299 or NZ$325 a month.
The term covers a wide range of products, and most of what is sold as an AI receptionist was designed for a trades business or a clinic. Those take a message. A venue phone does not want a message, it wants an order in the POS and a table in the book before the caller hangs up. This page explains the difference, what the category actually costs here, and where it falls over.
An AI receptionist answers an inbound call, understands what the caller wants in natural speech, and either completes the task or routes the call to a person. It is not an automated menu asking you to press one. There is no keypad and no script tree. The caller talks the way they would to staff, and the system responds.
Three things separate the products in this category, and price follows all three.
Skai Solutions sits in the third tier. It is worth being blunt about that, because paying transaction pricing for a phone that only carries enquiries is a bad buy, and we would rather say so here than on your third invoice.
The category runs roughly from A$50 a month to A$700 a month, and the spread is almost entirely about which of those three tiers you are buying. Market rates advertised in August 2026, with no company named because these move constantly:
| What you get | Typical monthly rate | What it does with a takeaway order |
|---|---|---|
| Message taking | from about NZ$19 / A$25 | Records it. Someone rings the customer back. |
| Human answering service | about A$130 to A$400 | Takes it by hand, emails it to you. |
| Generic AI receptionist | about A$100 to A$350 | Takes a message or a callback request. |
| Hospitality AI phone agent | A$299 to A$599 / NZ$325 to NZ$649 | Writes it into the POS during the call. |
Skai Solutions pricing: A$299 a month including 500 minutes or A$599 including 1,500, plus a one-off setup fee. New Zealand is NZ$325 and NZ$649. Full detail on Australian pricing and New Zealand pricing. Competitor ranges are advertised rates observed in August 2026 and will have moved.
Do the arithmetic before you buy anything. Take the calls you miss in a week, multiply by your average order value, multiply by four. That number is what the phone is costing you. If it is smaller than the monthly fee, do not buy any of this, including ours.
A worked example, using Skai Solutions' own model with the inputs shown so you can substitute your own: a venue missing 150 calls a month at an average A$40 order is losing A$6,000 a month in attempted orders. Not all of those convert, and a fair assumption is that half would have. That leaves about A$3,000 against A$299. This is arithmetic, not research, and the only number in it that matters is yours.
Sometimes. The failure is rarely the voice, it is the vocabulary. A generic system handles "what time do you close" perfectly and then falls apart on a real order, because a real order is "large pepperoni, no onion, half and half, and can you make the second one gluten free" delivered by someone standing next to a tram.
What a venue actually needs, in order of how often it breaks:
Skai Solutions was built for this and connects to the systems venues here actually run. The full list is on the POS integrations page, and there is a longer comparison of how the products in this category differ on AI phone agents for New Zealand restaurants.
Before you buy anything, it is worth fixing the free things first. Our guide to answering the phone at a restaurant covers the script, the six fields and three fixes that cost nothing, and how a virtual receptionist works explains the cheaper category this one sits above.
Still deciding whether the category is real? Read does an AI receptionist actually work, which covers the four ways it fails and five tests to run before you believe a demo.
Pricing is the question that follows this one for most operators. The Skai Solutions guide to how much an AI receptionist costs in Australia and New Zealand sets out the published plans, the four billing models and what a setup fee should buy.
Before buying anything, it is worth pricing the human version of the job. Restaurant receptionist duties and responsibilities covers what the role actually does and what the award pays for it, and the cheapest way to get a restaurant phone answered compares all five categories on cost.
Bring your actual call volume and your actual menu to a 30 minute demo. If the numbers say it will not pay for itself, we will tell you on the call.
Book a Free DemoEvery honest answer to this question is a short list, and anyone who gives you no list is selling.
Skai Solutions goes live in five days. That covers the full menu build including modifiers and sold-out handling, the POS connection, voice tuning for your venue's vocabulary, and support through go-live. You keep your existing phone number and divert calls to it, so there is no new hardware and no phone system to replace.
Five days is a build, not a signup. A product you can switch on in ten minutes has not learned your menu, and it will show on the first order.
This is the only question that decides the purchase, and it is answerable from published Australian data rather than from a vendor's model. The ATO small business benchmarks, built from 2023-24 tax returns and updated in March 2026, put cost of sales at 32% to 39% of turnover for restaurants in the A$65,000 to A$500,000 band, averaging 35%. For cafes and coffee shops in the smallest band the equivalent benchmark is 34% to 42%, averaging 38%.
That gives you the number that matters. A sale you miss does not cost you the food, because you never bought it. It costs the contribution, which on the restaurant average is about 65 cents in every sales dollar and on the cafe average about 62 cents.
| Venue | Average order or booking | Contribution lost per missed call, ATO averages | Missed calls a month to cover A$149 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cafe, small band | A$25 | about A$15.50 | about 10 |
| Takeaway | A$45 | about A$29 | about 5 |
| Restaurant, table of two | A$90 | about A$58 | about 3 |
| Restaurant, table of six | A$270 | about A$175 | 1 |
Worked example by Skai Solutions. The order values are illustrative inputs you should replace with your own average spend. The contribution share is the ATO benchmark average for the relevant industry and turnover band, not a Skai Solutions figure. The A$149 is an entry plan price, so substitute whatever you are actually quoted.
Read the last column honestly, because it cuts both ways. Three missed bookings a month is a low bar for a restaurant that is genuinely busy at 7:40pm on a Friday. Ten missed calls a month is not a low bar for a quiet cafe, and if you cannot say with confidence that you are losing that many, the honest answer is that you are not ready to buy this. Work out your own number before anyone shows you theirs, using your actual food cost percentage rather than the benchmark average.
If your phone mostly carries enquiries rather than orders, a basic message-taking plan is the right buy and it is not us. If you take fewer than about twenty calls a week, the arithmetic almost never works at any price. If your menu changes daily and your POS is not connected to anything, fix that first, because an AI receptionist reading a stale menu is worse than a phone nobody answers.
And if you are a clinic, a salon or a trades business, most of this category is built for you and we are not. We answer restaurant, cafe and takeaway phones in Australia and New Zealand, and that focus is the whole product.
For the mechanics rather than the category, how an AI phone answering service for restaurants works walks the call through stage by stage and lists what it handles badly. For the two numbers this decision usually turns on, see what restaurant no-shows actually cost, which runs at a recorded 1.41% of bookings in Australia, and what labour should cost as a percentage of revenue, which is about 40% across New Zealand hospitality.
A virtual receptionist is usually a person in a contact centre answering under your business name. An AI receptionist is software. The person is better at judgement and unusual situations. The software is better at volume, never misses a call, works at 2am, and costs less per call. There is a full breakdown of what each costs on our virtual receptionist cost page.
Skai Solutions writes the order into your POS and follows your venue's existing payment flow, which for most takeaway venues is payment on collection. Card capture over the phone brings card data handling obligations that most venues should not take on lightly.
Most will work it out, and that matters less than operators expect. What customers object to is not being answered, being put on hold, or having their order wrong. Being answered immediately by something that gets the order right rates better than ringing out.
It transfers to your team, with the context already captured so the caller is not starting again. Any system without a clean handover path is not ready for a venue phone.
Skai Solutions connects to Square, Kounta and Lightspeed, Impos, Oracle MICROS, Revel Systems, TouchBistro, Tevalis and H&L. Each one has its own page under POS integrations covering what syncs and what does not.