Kovo vs ConverseNow: Which Fits Your Restaurant?
ConverseNow sells drive-thru voice AI to QSR chains on a quote. Kovo sells one phone line per store from $99. The deciding row is where the ticket lands.
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The drive-thru lane has a menu board, a loop timer, and a camera counting cars. The phone in the same building has a handset and whoever happens to be standing closest to it.
That asymmetry explains the buying order in quick service. Voice AI goes into the lane first, because the lane is measured in cars per hour and the phone is measured on nobody's spreadsheet. ConverseNow is positioned in that lane-first market: voice AI for QSR and drive-thru, focused on high-volume chains, sold on a quote.
Which leaves the phone line. At 900 calls a month and roughly 30–32% of peak calls unanswered — a QSR Magazine analysis, estimate — nobody on the schedule notices. The callers notice, and research attributed to BIA/Kelsey puts the share who try again at around 15%.
TL;DR
- Kovo is one store, one line, one subscription: $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, reading the POS catalog, charging a card the shop already holds on the call, and booking tables in its own book.
- At 1,200 calls of two minutes, the 2,400 connected minutes fit Unlimited at $299, about 25 cents an answered call.
- The order limit is the shop's, defaulting to 10 items and 8 of one item, with optional large-party routing to your handset.
- One engine answers the phone and a website chat, so a menu question is answered the same way in both.
- ConverseNow is voice AI aimed at high-volume QSR and drive-thru, sold on a quote with no public list price (checked October 2026).
What Kovo is
Kovo is the phone line. It answers one store's phone, takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and sends the finished ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, an Epson Server Direct Print printer, or a Star CloudPRNT printer. The same engine answers a website chat. One store, one line, one subscription: a second location is a second number, a second menu, and a second bill.
The plans are $99 for 750 connected minutes and $299 for 5,000. Minutes are connected call time: a call under 10 seconds is never billed, no single call bills past 12 minutes, and when a month's minutes run out the calls forward to your own phone instead of an overage. The order limit belongs to the shop: defaults of 10 items in total and 8 of one item, editable, an optional value limit, and zero turns any of them off. Above a limit the call rings the shop when large-party routing is on; otherwise the agent says the order is too large and keeps taking what fits. It also books tables in its own book, availability derived from your hours and holiday exceptions, one seat written per slot, with a confirmation text.
Payment runs three ways. With cards off, placing the order confirms it and the caller pays when they collect. A caller who has paid before has a card vaulted on the shop's own Stripe account and charged off-session while the caller is still on the line, so the ticket reaches the kitchen during the call. A first-time caller gets a Checkout link by text with the line held open, and paying it vaults the card. No card number is spoken to the agent, recorded, or sent to a model.
What ConverseNow is
ConverseNow is voice AI for QSR and drive-thru, with high-volume chains as its stated market. It is sold on a quote, so there is no published number to compare against Kovo's $99 and $299. Everything here is dated October 2026 and worth re-checking on the vendor's own pages before you sign.
The positioning tells you what the product is built around: a lane where the caller is in a car, the menu is fixed, and the next car is already waiting. That is a hard problem, and a product that closes orders there is doing something a general phone agent does not.
What the positioning does not tell you is what happens to a phone order. Where the call ends, where the ticket lands, how a card is handled, and whether a table can be booked are not documented publicly for the phone channel. That is why so many cells below say confirm rather than yes or no.
The 30-second comparison
Cells come from vendor pages or a live call, dated October 2026. A blank is an invitation to ask.
| Kovo | ConverseNow | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $99/mo for 750 connected minutes; $299 for 5,000 | Quote-based; no public list price, checked October 2026 |
| What the call ends with | Order read back, then ticketed | Not publicly listed — confirm a phone order rather than a lane order |
| Where the ticket lands | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson Server Direct Print, Star CloudPRNT | Not publicly listed — confirm the POS list in writing |
| Card handling | A card the shop already holds, charged on the line; link for a first-time caller | Not publicly listed — confirm on a live call |
| Reservations | Kovo's own book; reads and texts an OpenTable or Resy page | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Multi-location | One store per subscription, nothing pooled | Positioned at multi-unit QSR brands |
| Setup | Self-serve import, test call, 14-day trial | Not publicly listed — confirm scope and timeline |
The row that should decide your deal is the second one. Not the price, not the voice quality on a demo line: what the call ends with. If the caller hangs up holding a ticket the kitchen can cook, the rest is procurement detail.
The arithmetic a quote leaves on your desk
A quote is an unknown, and unknowns get filled in by whoever is selling. Fill it in yourself before the second call.
The pricing page does the first sum: 1,200 calls of two minutes is 2,400 minutes, which fits Unlimited at $299, or 25 cents an answered call. At a two-and-a-half-minute average, 750 minutes covers about 300 calls, so the same store buys Unlimited, not Starter.
Then price the calls you are not answering. Industry estimates put a missed restaurant call at $35 to $85 once you count the ticket and the caller who never rings back. The full multiplication is in what missed calls cost a restaurant:
- 150 missed calls × $35 = $5,250 a month.
- 150 missed calls × $85 = $12,750 a month.
Against those numbers, any quote under four figures is a rounding error. Do not choose on the gap between $99 and a quote you have not seen in writing; choose on whether the phone order becomes a ticket, then negotiate.
Two questions to ask on the ConverseNow demo
"Is phone a first-class channel, or is this the drive-thru product on a handset?" The answer decides everything else. A product built for a lane has a fixed menu, a short conversational path, and a car that cannot walk away. A phone caller asks what is in the sauce, whether the fryer oil is shared, and whether there is a gluten-free crust. Ask the agent those questions.
"Show me the kitchen ticket from a phone order, on my POS." Not a transcript, not a dashboard summary. A ticket, with modifiers, printed where your line cooks look. The Toast walkthrough shows what that output should look like, and the QSR shortlist covers the rest of the segment.
What to check before you sign a quote
Get the all-in monthly figure at your volume in writing, and find out whether it scales by unit, by minute, or both. A per-lane price and a per-minute price behave differently when volume doubles in December.
Ask what the menu does when you 86 an item at 6 p.m., and who writes the modifier rules for a half-and-half order. One is a setup task; the other can be an hourly charge. On the Kovo side the 86 is an owner toggle in the menu board, and Square's sold-out flag and Clover's availability flag survive the daily pull.
Ask what happens at the end of the term and who keeps the phone number. A number is the one asset here a shop cannot regrow.
The decision, by situation
No scorecard: three shops, three answers. Pick ConverseNow if you are buying voice AI across a chain's lanes and want one contract to cover the sites.
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A QSR group with drive-thru lanes, buying one voice vendor across a dozen sites | ConverseNow | Lane throughput is the positioning, and one contract across units is a shape Kovo does not offer |
| A two-store owner who wants one number and one menu shared across both | ConverseNow, or another multi-unit vendor | Kovo bills each store separately: second line, second menu, second subscription, nothing pooled |
| A single shop with a takeout line, 600 to 1,500 calls a month, and a POS that holds the menu | Kovo | $99 or $299 with the ticket written into Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a printer |
The comparison hub has the rest of the shortlist.
FAQ
Does ConverseNow publish a price?
No list price is public. ConverseNow is sold on a quote, checked October 2026, so the monthly number depends on unit count, scope, and the term you sign. Ask for the all-in monthly figure at your call volume in writing, including any per-location or per-minute component. Kovo publishes two numbers instead: $99 for 750 connected minutes and $299 for 5,000.
Can Kovo run a group with 12 locations?
No. One subscription covers one store and nothing is pooled: a second location is its own line, its own number, its own menu, and its own bill. Twelve stores is twelve subscriptions, and a group that size is a multi-unit contract conversation rather than a per-store subscription.
What happens to a 40-taco phone order?
By default it is declined. The limit belongs to the shop: 10 items in total and 8 of one item unless the owner changes them, plus an optional order-value limit, and setting any of them to zero turns it off. Above the limit the call rings your handset if large-party routing is on and a number is set; otherwise the agent says the order is too large to send through and keeps taking what fits. A party order still wants a person who can quote a lead time.
How many calls should a QSR expect the phone to miss?
The commonly cited estimate is about 150 calls a month per restaurant, and roughly 30–32% of them go unanswered during the 5–8 p.m. peak, per a QSR Magazine analysis. At $35 to $85 a missed ticket, 150 calls is $5,250 to $12,750 a month in orders nobody priced. Those figures are estimates across the category, not a reading of your call log.
How long does setup take?
Kovo is self-serve: connect ordering, import the menu, take a test call, which a shop with a Toast, Square, Clover, or Olo catalog usually does in a day, and the 14-day trial needs no card. ConverseNow's implementation is not publicly listed, so ask for the timeline in days, the name of who writes your menu rules, and what happens to your existing drive-thru hardware.
Final Thoughts
Kovo and ConverseNow are not the same purchase. One is a $99 phone line for one store that ends the call with a ticket in the kitchen; the other is a voice platform sold into QSR chains with a lane-first story and a quoted price.
If you have one shop and a handset nobody wants to answer between orders, the decision is simpler than a table makes it look. If you have lanes and a group buying office, the quote conversation is the right one.
Kovo starts at $99 with 14 days free and no card at signup. Order your busiest seller down the line and keep the ticket. Take a test call with your own menu and listen for the read-back.