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 and re-checked on 29 September 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. Category ranges are advertised rates first observed in August 2026 and re-read on 29 September 2026.
A dated price is only worth the date on it, so Skai Solutions re-read the category on 29 September 2026 rather than leaving an August figure sitting there for another month. The finding is a negative one and worth recording plainly: the bottom of the band has not moved. A New Zealand message-taking plan is still advertised from about NZ$19 a month, the same floor observed in August, on a page re-read today.
That matters more than it sounds, because the floor is what every quote gets compared against. When an operator says an AI receptionist is expensive, the number in their head is almost always the message-taking floor, and the reason the two are not comparable is the third column of the table above rather than anything about the technology. NZ$19 records the call. It does not put the order in the till.
The two ends of this band behave differently. Message taking is a mature, price-competed category and its floor has been stable. Transaction-completion pricing is newer, usually metered on included minutes, and moves with the minute allowance rather than the headline. So when you compare two quotes, compare the included minutes and the overage rate, not the monthly number. Ours is A$299 for 500 minutes or A$599 for 1,500, and setup takes five days.
Two limits on that table, stated rather than buried. Every range in it is an advertised rate, which is the seller's number and not necessarily the invoiced one. And none of the figures are a company's quoted price for your venue, because published tiers in this category routinely stop short of what a venue actually needs and the real number arrives in a proposal.
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.
The gap is measurable in two places and neither is the voice. The first is the menu. A general AI receptionist knows your opening hours; a restaurant one has to know that "half and half" is a pizza instruction, that a flat white is not a latte, and that the gluten free base costs more and is sometimes out. The second is what happens at 6:40pm, when the phone rings six times in four minutes and every one of those callers is worth an average order.
Skai Solutions publishes its own arithmetic on this rather than a claim. A venue missing 150 calls a month at an average order value of A$40 is leaving A$6,000 of demand unanswered a month, and those are our inputs, shown so you can substitute yours. Against the Australian Bureau of Statistics measured operating margin for food and beverage services of 6.65% in 2024-25, that A$6,000 of sales is about A$399 of profit before tax a month, which is the honest way to read the number rather than treating recovered revenue as recovered profit.
Margin derived from ABS Australian Industry 2024-25, released 18 September 2026: operating profit before tax A$8,917m on sales and service income of A$134,077m for Food and beverage services. The 150 calls and A$40 are Skai Solutions' own worked example inputs, not a measurement of your venue.
Where to go next depends on your venue. A coffee shop's call pattern is different again, short calls, heavy morning peak, and that is covered on the AI receptionist for coffee shops page. For a takeaway taking orders rather than bookings, see AI phone ordering for takeaways. The full cost breakdown sits on what an AI receptionist costs, and the category comparison is on the cheapest way to answer a restaurant phone.
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 DemoNo. Read whether an AI receptionist works for a coffee shop instead, which runs the arithmetic on ATO coffee shop margins and names the cafes that should not buy one. Everything below here is about restaurants, where bookings are worth multiples of a coffee and the calls arrive during service rather than before it. Two other lines sit just off this one: the on-hold music licence is billed separately from your dining room music and disappears entirely if nobody is put on hold, and the card surcharge ban from 1 October 2026 changes which revenue levers a venue has left.
Every 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%.
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.
| Venue | Average order or booking | Contribution lost per missed call, ATO averages | Missed calls a month to cover A$149 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. Three a month is not a low bar for a quiet dining room, 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.
Three, and the one a vendor picks tells you who they built the product for.
A flat monthly fee with minutes included. Skai Solutions charges A$299 a month for 500 minutes or A$599 for 1,500, plus a one-off A$499 setup fee, prices excluding GST. Divide it out and the included minutes cost A$0.60 and A$0.40 respectively, and minutes beyond the plan are A$0.80. You know the number before the month starts, which matters in a business where the phone is busiest in the weeks your labour bill is also worst.
Pay per minute, with no floor. Attractive on a quiet line and expensive on a busy one, because the bill scales with exactly the thing you are trying to grow. A venue taking 1,500 minutes of calls a month on a per minute plan is paying per minute for the peak as well as the trough. If your phone rings twenty times a week, per minute is the cheaper buy and you should take it.
Per call or per resolved call. Reads well and is hard to budget, because a ninety second hours enquiry and a nine minute function booking count the same. It suits businesses whose calls are all one shape. A restaurant's calls are not all one shape.
The thing to compare is not the headline rate, it is the cost of a normal month at your own call volume, with setup spread over the term you actually expect to stay. Our full working, including what the same coverage costs rostered to a person at award rates, is on what an AI receptionist costs and on Skai Solutions pricing.
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.
Almost none of them, and it is worth being exact about that. The two costs that decide whether a hospitality week made money are stock and wages, added together and read as a share of sales. On the Australian Taxation Office's small business benchmarks from lodged 2023-24 returns, a restaurant billing A$500,001 to A$2 million ran average cost of sales of 35% of turnover and labour of 23% to 32%. That is a combined band of roughly 58% to 67%, centred near 62.5%, which is Skai Solutions' addition of the ATO's published averages rather than an ATO figure.
A phone agent moves neither half. It does not buy stock better and it does not lower an award rate. It sits in the other quarter of turnover, the overhead line, beside the booking software and the card terminal, and that line is almost entirely fixed: A$255,000 of annual overhead on a A$1 million venue is about A$699 a day, every day, whether the room is full or empty. So the mechanism is not saving a cost. It is not wasting a cost you already paid, and restaurant prime cost gives the band for every turnover tier.
For the mechanics rather than the category, how an AI phone answering service for restaurants works, what an after hours answering service does and what a rostered casual costs 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.
Related: how long a restaurant phone should ring before someone answers, and what an hour of staff time has to earn before the phone is worth taking off the roster.