Most of what a restaurant’s phone receives is the same five requests: a table, a change, a cancellation, an allergy, a question about hours. At TalkRev we have spent two years answering those calls with AI, and we have written about what the industry is seeing: OpenTable booked three million diners through voice AI and unanswered calls cost a quick-service restaurant tens of thousands a year. Turno is what we built with that: an agent for restaurants that lives where their guests already are.
What Turno is
Turno is an agent for restaurants that works by text and by phone, all on one number. The phone number is the account: Turno sees who is texting or calling and opens what is theirs. A guest gets their booking. A server gets the floor. The owner gets the whole place.
Guests book, change or cancel a table; set up a group dinner and pay the deposit; flag an allergy before they arrive, and order and pay from the table. Staff see the sheet for the day, confirm, move or cancel bookings, seat tables and combine them, and dictate an order as a voice note that Turno checks before it goes to the kitchen. The owner asks “How’s tonight looking?”, changes opening hours, adds a dish from a photo, invites a server by phone number and gets the numbers for the week. Nobody installs anything and nobody remembers a password.
Why WhatsApp first
In Spain, where Turno starts, the guest’s first move is a message, not a form. A restaurant that answers on WhatsApp answers where the conversation already is, with the guest’s name and history in the same thread. We wrote up the case, in Spanish, in reservas por WhatsApp para restaurantes, sin app. The phone does not go away: Turno picks up calls during service and after hours, and it is the same agent on both.
Where the pilot starts
Turno is preparing its pilot in Spain with group and company dinners: each guest confirms, flags allergies and pays a deposit in their own chat, and the day before, the table sheet reaches the restaurant with who is coming, which allergies to prepare for and which deposits are paid. It is the part of the job that today means chasing people one by one, and the part where a per-guest deposit changes the night.
Turno is a service of Talkrev, Inc. The product site is at turno.ai, in Spanish at turno.ai/es.
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