Your questions, answered plainly

HungerCall is an AI phone assistant for UK restaurants and takeaways. It answers your restaurant’s phone when your team is busy, takes the order or the table booking, works out the total from your own price list, texts the customer a payment link and prints the kitchen ticket.

Your team follows orders and bookings on a tablet dashboard.

Yes. Your customers keep ringing the number they already know, and you divert calls to the number we set up for the assistant. You choose when: if your line is busy, if nobody answers, or for all calls.

We suggest starting with ‘busy’ and ‘no answer’, so your team answers what it can and the assistant takes the calls you send to it. On a landline the divert is a short dialling code; on a mobile or internet phone line you set it up in your provider’s app.

We set it up with you, so we don’t quote a fixed timescale. Our part is your menu, the assistant, its phone number and linking your kitchen printer to your account. Your part is diverting your restaurant’s phone and having a printer and a tablet ready. We go through the details with you.

The dashboard is a web app that runs in the browser on a tablet, and you can add it to the tablet’s home screen so it opens full screen. For Android tablets that can’t install web apps there is an Android app, which is installed directly rather than from an app store.

Either way it needs an internet connection, and it doesn’t work offline. If you want to use a different kind of device, ask us and we will talk you through it: sales@hungercall.uk.

We set up your menu, your prices and the assistant’s ordering rules with you; there is no menu upload for you to do. Bring your menu to a demo and we will tell you plainly how it would be set up and whether anything on it needs special handling.

While you’re open, the assistant puts the caller through to your team, by a real phone transfer to a number you choose. That covers anything it can’t confirm, such as ingredients or today’s availability, and an order that has already been saved, which it won’t change or cancel itself.

If nobody picks up, it takes a message and saves it as a case for your manager, without promising a callback. When you’re closed there is nobody to put the call through to, so it tells the caller you’re closed and ends the call.

If a caller mentions an allergy, the assistant is set up to write it into the order, and it is printed in the kitchen-note box on the ticket. The dashboard tags orders whose note reads like an allergy. That is a keyword match, so keep your usual allergy checks in the kitchen.

HungerCall holds no allergen information, so the assistant never guesses whether a dish is safe. If a caller asks, it puts them through to your team while you’re open. It records what the caller tells it; it doesn’t check it.

The assistant takes a complaint calmly, apologises once and writes it up as a support case that your team can see on the dashboard. While you’re open it then puts the caller through to your manager.

It is set up never to approve, reject or promise a refund, replacement or free food: refund requests are flagged for your manager, who decides. HungerCall doesn’t send refunds itself, so anything owed to a customer is paid by you.

It depends on the time of day and on the opening hours you set. From 8am until you open, the assistant tells callers you’re closed but can take a pre-order for a time it has checked, and table bookings.

After you close for the night and before 8am, it politely says you’re closed and ends the call: no order, no booking and no message. While you’re closed it doesn’t put callers through to staff or promise a callback.

It takes bookings by phone: the date, time, number of guests, name and phone number, plus any special request such as a birthday, which it records but doesn’t promise. The booking appears on the dashboard calendar and prints a slip in the kitchen, and the customer gets a confirmation text with a reminder about an hour before.

It checks the time against your dining-room hours, but it does not check availability or count tables, so it can’t stop two bookings landing on the same table. A caller can ring back from the number they booked with to change the number of guests or cancel; a new date or time is a new booking.

It answers with your restaurant’s name and speaks brisk, plain English in short sentences, one question at a time. Replies take a few seconds, and if one is slow it says ‘Just a moment’.

It is built for English-speaking callers and UK phone numbers, and everything it says and texts is in English. We don’t make promises about particular accents or other languages, so the best test is to hear it on a demo.

If nobody speaks, the assistant checks in once and then ends the call. Callers who wander off-topic are steered back to orders, bookings, restaurant information or customer support, and the call is ended politely if they carry on.

Genuine supplier and business calls that need your manager are passed to the manager while you’re open, not turned away. Nuisance and silent calls are not charged to you.

The customer chooses on the call. To pay online they get a text with a payment link and pay by card on Stripe’s own secure checkout page. Otherwise they pay when they collect, or pay the driver on delivery.

The assistant is set up never to take card or bank details over the phone, and card details are entered on Stripe’s page, not on ours.

Not for online orders. Those only reach your kitchen once Stripe confirms the payment, and that confirmation never depends on the customer’s browser.

If a customer doesn’t finish paying, they get one reminder text after 5 minutes. By default the order is given up after 15 minutes: it is not sent to the kitchen and is flagged on the dashboard so your team can call the customer, though a payment that arrives late still starts it. Orders paid at collection go straight to the kitchen, marked NOT PAID on the ticket.

Totals are worked out by HungerCall’s system from your own price list, not by the AI. The assistant can only say a total the system gives it, and it can’t mark an order as paid or add a dish your menu can’t price.

If it isn’t sure what a customer means, it asks, for example whether they want a can or a bottle. The customer sees every charge itemised on their payment page before they pay.

Customers who pay online are texted their payment link, then one reminder if they haven’t finished. Once the order starts they get a ‘being prepared’ text, with an estimated time if you’ve set your kitchen times, and delivery customers can follow its progress on the same link.

Tapping Ready for collection or Out for delivery on the dashboard sends a text saying so, once. Table bookings get a confirmation and a reminder about an hour before. A customer who pays at collection isn’t texted until you tap Ready.

Each ticket shows whether it’s collection or delivery, the order number, the items, the totals and a PAID or NOT PAID box. A kitchen-note box carries any allergy or special request, including one made about a single dish, and the customer’s name and phone number are printed too.

Delivery tickets add the address and a driver note; collection tickets carry a code to ask for before handing the order over. Pre-booked orders are headed SCHEDULED, with the time wanted in large type.

Tickets are laid out for 80mm thermal receipt printers, connected by WiFi or network cable, or by USB to an Android tablet. Ordinary printers can be used through the Windows printer driver.

A small program on a PC or Raspberry Pi that stays switched on collects the tickets and prints them, or the Android app can print them itself over USB or WiFi. Not every printer will work, so ask us about yours before you buy: sales@hungercall.uk.

The ticket waits. It stays queued until the printer confirms it has printed, and if the printer can’t be reached it is retried every 15 seconds for up to an hour.

Meanwhile the order is on your dashboard, which shows a warning when the printing device hasn’t checked in. Once the printer is back the ticket prints, and you can reprint any ticket from the order.

The printed kitchen ticket is the signal. The dashboard’s Overview refreshes itself every 20 seconds, but there is no sound or push alert, and the other pages update when you open them.

On the dashboard your team can see each order with its notes, total and payment status, move it along from preparing to ready to collected, and search by customer name, phone number or order number.

A one-tap ‘Taking orders’ switch on the Overview pauses new phone orders. While it’s off, the assistant says orders are paused but still takes table bookings and answers menu questions. You can also set the kitchen to Normal, Busy or Very busy, which changes the ready time the assistant quotes and the earliest time it accepts, but doesn’t slow or reorder anything.

Your team can mark a dish out of stock on the tablet, or change a price, and the assistant uses the change the next time it prices an order. Adding or renaming dishes goes through us.

£49 a month, plus per-use charges for the calls and texts it handles.

An order is £2.00, which covers the first 5 minutes of the call, then 50p for each further minute started, and a table booking is £3.00 on the same basis. Other calls, such as a question or a complaint, are 40p for each minute started, rising to 50p after 5 minutes. Texts to your customers are 8p per text segment.

The order charge is a flat amount, not a share of your food bill.

Some of them. A question, a complaint or an order that isn’t completed is charged by the minute, at 40p for each minute started, rising to 50p after 5 minutes.

If a customer never pays an online order’s link, the call is charged as an unfinished order at that rate, not at the order price. Nuisance and silent calls are not charged to you.

Yes. The dashboard has a billing screen, behind the owner PIN, that lists each call with its length, what it was charged and why, with the working shown for every charge. The groups add up exactly to the total.

The pricing page shows the monthly fee and the per-use charges. If you have a question about getting started that isn’t answered on the site, ask us and we will talk you through it: sales@hungercall.uk.

Yes. You can play back calls the assistant has taken on the dashboard, with a transcript beside the audio: click a line and the audio jumps to that moment. Each call is linked to the order, booking or complaint it produced. The list shows your most recent calls.

Recordings sit behind their own PIN, even for someone who is already signed in, and by default the screen locks again after 10 minutes.

Each restaurant has one shared login, so anyone on your team with the details can sign in. A separate owner PIN sits in front of billing and the business reports, and call recordings have their own PIN.

There are no separate staff and manager accounts, and no record of which person did what.

Call recordings and transcripts are held by the voice service that powers the assistant and played back through your dashboard.

Storage locations and retention periods are still being confirmed, so ask us and we will tell you what we can confirm: sales@hungercall.uk.