ConverseNow Alternatives for Restaurants
ConverseNow is built for drive-thru throughput, not a ringing phone. Six alternatives for QSR and pizza shops, plus the ten-minute test that separates them.
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Two lanes, one headset, and a timer on the wall the shift leader watches. Drive-thru voice AI earns its price in seconds off an average lane time, and it is built for a caller already parked at the menu board.
The office phone is a different instrument. Roughly 30 to 32% of restaurant calls go unanswered at the 5 to 8 p.m. peak, per a QSR Magazine analysis, and in a shop wired for the lane that phone may belong to nobody.
ConverseNow sells voice AI for QSR and drive-thru throughput. If your orders arrive by phone, the question is whether phone is a real channel or an input bolted onto the lane.
TL;DR
- ConverseNow is built around QSR and drive-thru throughput, the right optimization for a lane and a guess for a ringing phone.
- Roughly 30 to 32% of restaurant calls go unanswered at the 5 to 8 p.m. peak, per a QSR Magazine estimate, and an unanswered call rarely comes back.
- Ask one question in the demo: is phone a first-class channel with its own menu handling, or an input into the lane product?
- Published alternatives start at $99 and $199 a month: Kovo $99 for 750 connected minutes, Loman from $199 with no per-minute fees (October 2026).
- Kovo writes to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo or a printer, handles half-and-half pies, and gives you 14 days free to order one (plans).
What ConverseNow is built to optimize
Drive-thru voice AI has one job: keep the lane moving without a human taking the order twice. Short turns, a fixed menu tree, and confidence in a noisy place where a wrong number is faster to fix than a repeated question.
The commercial case is throughput. More cars an hour, fewer mistakes at the window, a labor line that does not grow with volume.
A single restaurant's phone does not work that way. The caller asks for a pickup time, whether the fries travel, whether the gluten-free crust is real, and changes their mind twice.
Who should stay on ConverseNow
Stay if the lane is where the revenue is and the phone is a rounding error. A QSR with a drive-thru doing the volume and a phone that rings thirty times a day is buying the right product, and a phone-first alternative would be a worse lane system.
Stay too if you are multi-unit and need one voice vendor across a brand, which is a procurement problem as much as a product one. On lane throughput at chain scale, ConverseNow is the specialist here, and a $99 phone product is not competing with it.
Who should leave, and what the lane hides
Leave when the phone is the counter. A pizza shop taking 400 calls a month, a Chinese restaurant whose lunch orders come by phone, a burger spot whose online ordering never got adopted: the lane's strengths do not touch any of that.
Leave too if the menu model cannot hold your menu. Test the pizza case hardest: half-and-half where each half opens its own topping groups, sizes that reprice every modifier, pickup quotes asked for by name.
The lane hides one failure a demo will not show. An agent tuned for a speaker box can be thrown by a TV or a kid in the back seat, because a phone caller is the one caller not in a car.
Six options for a phone-first shop
Published information, October 2026. Where a vendor sells on a quote, the table says so.
| Option | Best for | Published price | Order on the call | POS path | Card handling | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ConverseNow | Drive-thru and QSR throughput | Quote | Built around QSR and drive-thru | Confirm on the demo | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| VOICEplug AI | Multi-channel ordering | Quote | Phone, drive-thru, kiosk | Confirm on the demo | Ask about new cards versus stored ones | Hardware-dependent; confirm |
| Hi Auto and Presto | Drive-thru lanes with hardware | Quote | Lane-first | Confirm on the demo | Not publicly listed — confirm | Hardware install |
| Loman | Closing the whole call | From $199/mo, no per-minute fees | Yes, with modifiers | Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, SkyTab, Aloha, Olo | Card taken during the call, per the vendor | Live in under 24 hours, per the vendor |
| SoundHound | Brands wanting a platform vendor | Quote | Restaurant ordering is one vertical | Confirm which POS on the demo | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Kovo | Takeout phone lines | $99/mo or $299/mo | Yes, with modifiers and a read-back | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson, Star | A card the shop already holds, charged on the line; Stripe link for a first-time caller | Self-serve; test call the same day |
Kovo is in this table because it belongs to us; the rows around it come from each vendor's public pages. Four of six sell on a quote, which is why the demo question outranks the price list.
The six options, one at a time
ConverseNow
ConverseNow is the incumbent and the specialist: voice AI for QSR and drive-thru, aimed at high-volume chains. If the lane is your bottleneck, this is a list of one. The caveat is the reason you are here: ask whether phone is a first-class channel or an extension of the lane build, and ask with your worst menu case on the table. Kovo vs ConverseNow has the side-by-side.
VOICEplug AI
VOICEplug covers phone, drive-thru, kiosk and pizza-specific channels in one product, unusual breadth here and useful if you already run a pizza brand. It publishes a 50 to 75% cut in order labor and a 12 to 25% lift in check size, both vendor claims rather than audits. The caveat is payments: ask whether it can take a new card on a call or only stored methods, and check the hardware list.
Hi Auto and Presto
Hi Auto and Presto sell drive-thru voice AI with lane hardware attached. A shop that wants the microphone, the speaker and the software from one vendor gets a coherent buy, and the install is somebody else's project. The caveat is the phone: ask whether phone ordering is supported at all, because a lane product with a phone input is not a phone product. The Kovo vs Hi Auto comparison covers the trade.
Loman
Loman is the full-closure phone option: order with modifiers, card inside the call, ticket into a long published POS list, two-way OpenTable booking documented, from $199 a month with no per-minute fees (published pricing, October 2026). It publishes 99.6% order accuracy on a 20M+ call corpus, a vendor claim and not an audit. The caveat is price at low volume, and the Loman alternatives list runs the same test on that product.
SoundHound
SoundHound is a voice platform with restaurant ordering among its verticals, so the appeal is one vendor and one contract if you want voice elsewhere in the business too. The caveat is packaging: ask whether the restaurant product has a published scope and which POS systems it writes to. A platform answer can be right, but it is never the quick one.
Kovo
Kovo is ours and it works the phone line: $99 for 750 connected minutes, $299 for 5,000, one store per subscription, no overage because at the cap calls forward to your own phone. It takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and writes the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson Server Direct Print or Star CloudPRNT printer. Nested choice groups mean a half-and-half pie opens its own groups per half, and a website chat runs on the same engine. It books tables in its own book rather than writing into OpenTable or Resy, charges a card the shop already holds while the caller is still on the line, and sends a first-time caller a link without hanging up. Delivery runs on the shop's own drivers.
The first ten minutes of a replacement demo
Ten minutes, one call, and a room with the radio on.
- Order two items with modifiers, and change one after the read-back.
- Order something you have just 86'd, and listen for whether the agent invents a yes.
- Ask for a pickup time, then ask what is in the sauce.
- Hang up and find the ticket: KDS, printer, or a message somebody retypes.
- Ask what that call cost on your plan, and where the meter stops.
Step two separates a demo from a shift. An agent that agrees with everything is pleasant for ten minutes and expensive on a Saturday.
The arithmetic: lane seconds versus missed calls
The lane math belongs to your average lane time. The phone math is easier.
If the phone gives up 30 to 32% of calls at the peak, 400 missed calls a month at $35 each is $14,000; at $85 each it is $34,000. Both ends are estimates, and either one dwarfs a $99 or $299 subscription.
Then capacity. Starter is 750 connected minutes, which at a two-minute phone order is about 375 calls, and Unlimited is 5,000 minutes, more phone than most single shops have. A lane system priced on throughput does not care about any of it.
Who this is wrong for
If the lane is the business, buy the lane product. If you need one vendor across a hundred units with hardware at each site, a self-serve phone line is not a substitute.
The middle case needs care: a QSR with both channels, where the phone takes pickup orders all day and nobody owns it. That shop needs a phone product without switching the lane, and comparing the platforms is how to find one.
FAQ
Why do restaurants leave ConverseNow?
The usual reason is channel fit. ConverseNow builds voice AI for QSR and drive-thru throughput, and a shop whose orders arrive by phone can end up buying lane expertise it never uses. The second reason is scope: a pizza shop taking 400 calls a month with half-and-half pies, pickup times and items 86'd mid-service needs a menu model built for choices inside choices, which is a different problem from a fixed menu board.
Is ConverseNow only for drive-thru restaurants?
Public information positions it around QSR and drive-thru, so that is a question to ask on a call rather than assume either way. Ask whether phone is a first-class channel with its own menu handling, or a second input into the lane product. If it is the second, a phone-first shop should keep looking, because its calls are the whole revenue and not an overflow; 750 connected minutes at $99 covers about 300 of them.
What should I test in the first ten minutes of a replacement demo?
Call from a room with a radio on and order two items with modifiers, one of them an item you have just 86'd. Ten minutes is enough to hear whether the agent invents a price, guesses, or says the short rib is out. Then ask where the ticket landed: the KDS, a printer, or a message somebody re-types.
What do the alternatives cost?
Two are published: Kovo at $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, and Loman from $199 a month with no per-minute fees (published pricing, October 2026). VOICEplug, Hi Auto, Presto, SoundHound and ConverseNow itself sell on a quote or an enterprise contract, so the number to compare is the all-in monthly at your call volume, in writing.
Can Kovo handle a pizza menu with half-and-half?
Kovo handles nested choice groups, where each half of a pie opens its own groups, and it keeps a lexicon for how callers actually say items. The limit that matters is size, and it belongs to the shop: defaults of 10 items in total and 8 of one item, both editable, plus an optional order-value limit. Above it the call rings your handset if you turned on large-party routing, and otherwise the agent says the order is too large and keeps taking what fits, so a 40-pie party order still needs a person on a phone.
Final Thoughts
ConverseNow is a throughput product, and throughput is measured in a lane. If that is your bottleneck, stay and negotiate units rather than hunt for a cheaper phone line. If the bottleneck is a phone nobody picks up, the deciding evidence is one call with a mistake in it.
Kovo is the phone end of that list: $99 a month for 750 connected minutes, $299 for 5,000, self-serve, no overage, its own table book, and a ticket on your own POS. Take the call with a half-and-half pie and an 86'd item before you compare quotes. Take a test call with your own menu.