Otto Featured in SmartCompany: Voice Is the Last Untapped Channel in Hospitality

Otto was recently featured in SmartCompany, one of Australia's most widely read publications for startup founders and small business owners. The piece profiles Otto founder Shannon Hautot and the thinking behind building an AI phone agent purpose-built for restaurants and hospitality venues.

Read the full article on SmartCompany →

Why voice? Why now?

"Despite the great advancement made in hospitality technology, voice has remained largely undisrupted. It's the next best interface and the last untapped channel to be digitised in the sector and we're making it finally usable."
Shannon Hautot, CEO & Founder, Otto

Online ordering has transformed hospitality over the past decade. But for restaurants that rely on takeaway and delivery, the phone never went away. Busy services, short-staffed kitchens, after-hours calls, and every one of those rings represents a potential order, and far too many go unanswered.

As Shannon told SmartCompany, venues focused on takeaway and delivery still handle a major portion of their orders by phone. Tight rostering and peak-period pressure mean restaurants regularly miss calls. As he put it: "We strongly feel that in hospitality, every missed call is potentially a missed order, and we're determined to help venues stop leaving money on the table." If you want to put a number on what that's costing your venue, try the Otto missed calls calculator.

Otto was built to solve exactly that problem.

What makes Otto different

As SmartCompany noted, Otto isn't the robotic "Press 1 for more information" experience that's frustrated customers for years. It's a conversational AI agent that handles the full range of inbound calls for a restaurant:

• Takes phone orders and sends them directly to the kitchen (no staff involvement needed)
• Books and manages table reservations in real time
• Answers questions about dietary requirements, daily specials, and menu items
• Handles catering enquiries for events, corporate orders, and functions
• Routes urgent calls, including complaints and complex requests, straight to a real human
• Responds in the caller's language automatically, no button-pressing required

And critically: Otto works with whatever tech stack your venue already runs. No lock-in, no ripping out your POS. See how Otto works. Most venues are live within one business day.

Built lean, built for operators

Otto is self-funded, and it was a deliberate choice. As Shannon told SmartCompany, keeping the startup fully in-house "allowed us to have full control on the product development and launch, while allowing us to be agile and not constrained by having to satisfy investor needs."

That agility shows up in the product. Otto runs on a month-to-month subscription with no setup fees and a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Plans start at $0 per month on the Starter tier, scaling up based on call volume. Full pricing details are at callotto.ai/pricing.

Otto is part of the MOBI and HungryHungry family, the same team behind some of Australia's most widely used hospitality ordering technology, but it stands alone as its own product, designed to serve any venue regardless of what ordering platform they already use.

Voice is just the beginning

"While ordering will likely start as our heartland, it really is just the tip of the iceberg as to what the technology is capable of."
Scott Fox, Chief AI Officer, Otto

The SmartCompany feature captures what the Otto team has believed from day one: voice is the most human interface there is, and it's finally ready to be done properly in hospitality. The problem of missed calls isn't a staffing problem. It's an infrastructure problem, and infrastructure can be fixed.

If you're a venue still losing revenue every time a call goes unanswered, it's worth seeing what Otto can do. Book a demo or explore Otto's phone ordering solution to see how it works for venues like yours.