Kovo vs Hi Auto: Which Fits Your Restaurant?
Hi Auto puts voice AI in the drive-thru lane. Kovo answers the phone line. Compare what each channel costs, where the ticket lands, and which one to fix first.
On this page
The headset and the handset live on the same person. Someone in a quick-service store wears the headset, takes orders from the lane, and the phone on the counter behind them rings until it stops. Nobody writes down how many times it stopped.
That is the split Hi Auto and Kovo live on. Hi Auto sells drive-thru voice AI with hardware and lane integration, on a quote (published positioning, October 2026). Kovo sells the other line: one phone number per store, answered, order read back, ticket sent to the POS.
They are not two versions of the same purchase. One automates a channel with a timer and a camera on it. The other automates the channel that has no instrumentation at all, which is why the phone is usually the one nobody has measured.
TL;DR
- Kovo is a phone line, not a lane: it answers, takes the order, reads it back, and prints the ticket at Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a Star or Epson printer for $99 a month.
- Kovo charges the card the shop already holds while the caller is still on the line, and texts a link to a first-time caller with the line held open until it clears.
- Three minutes of a $17-an-hour employee's time is about 85 cents, so 500 answered calls a month carries roughly $425 in wage before payroll tax.
- A lane already has a loop timer, a camera, and an order screen. The phone usually has none, which is where the missed orders hide.
- Hi Auto is drive-thru voice AI with hardware and lane integration, sold on a quote, and its published positioning is the lane rather than the phone line.
What each product is
Kovo is the phone half of a quick-service store: it picks up the number customers dial, takes the order as described, reads it back, and writes the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson or Star printer. One subscription per store, self-serve from signup to a test call.
The order survives the parts of a menu that break voice systems. Nested choice groups are supported, half-and-half opens its own groups on each half, and a lexicon maps how callers actually say an item onto the catalog. The menu refreshes once a day, so an answered call never waits on a vendor. Pricing is flat and published: $99 a month for 750 connected minutes, $299 for 5,000, and at the cap calls forward to your own phone rather than billing an overage.
Hi Auto is drive-thru voice AI with hardware and lane integration, sold on a quote. The product sits in the lane, takes the order through a speaker, and works with the confirmation screen the customer sees before the window. That is a hardware-and-site job: mounting, audio, a lane that has to keep moving at the pace of the cars in it.
What the vendor does not publish is the part a phone buyer needs. Phone ordering is not documented on the public pages, the price is quote-based, and the POS path for a phone order is not listed. Ask all three in writing, and ask for a live demonstration on a phone number, not a recording from a lane.
The 30-second comparison
Published information, October 2026. The two products sit in different places in the building, so half of these rows are not really a contest.
| Kovo | Hi Auto | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $99/mo for 750 connected minutes | Quote-based; no published price |
| Channel | The phone number customers dial | The drive-thru lane |
| What the call ends with | Order read back, ticket written to the POS | Order confirmed in the lane, per the vendor |
| Where the ticket lands | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson, Star | POS integration, per the vendor; named list not published — confirm |
| Card handling | Known card charged on the call; link for a first-time caller | Payment at the window, in a lane workflow |
| Reservations | Kovo's own book; reads and texts a page for OpenTable or Resy | Not applicable to a lane |
| Setup | Self-serve: import menu, take a test call | Hardware and lane installation, per the vendor |
The row worth arguing about is "channel", because it decides whether this is a comparison at all. If your store has a lane and no answering problem, the rest of the table is somebody else's decision.
Why the lane and the phone are not the same problem
A drive-thru lane is measured. There is a loop timer, a camera counting cars, a screen the customer reads, and a manager who knows the average time to the window. When a lane goes wrong, the data already exists.
The phone is not measured in most restaurants. There is no timer on a ring, no count of how many calls hit voicemail, and no record of what the caller wanted. A QSR Magazine analysis estimates the average restaurant misses about 150 calls a month and that roughly 30–32% go unanswered during the 5–8 p.m. peak. Those are estimates across the category, not your store, but the shape of the claim is the point: an unanswered call leaves no trace, so nobody buys a fix for it.
Automating the lane does not change that number. It may make it worse for one quarter, because the person who used to answer the phone between cars now has a lane system to watch instead of a handset. That is the honest reason a lane deployment and a phone deployment are separate decisions, and the reason a store can be three years into lane AI with an unanswered phone.
What an answered call costs in labor
The number to compare against a quote is not another vendor's price. It is the wage.
- A person answering the phone at $17 an hour costs about 28 cents a minute.
- Three minutes of that time is about 85 cents, before payroll tax and before the order the same person did not take while the phone was at their ear.
- 500 calls a month × 85 cents = about $425 of wage.
Kovo's Unlimited plan is $299 for 5,000 connected minutes, which is 1,500 minutes at 500 calls of three minutes. The pricing page shows that plan arithmetic directly.
So the phone argument is not subtle. Either the calls are answered by someone who costs $425 a month to answer them, or they are not answered, in which case the missed-call math applies instead. A quote has to beat one of those two numbers, and both are yours to check.
The decision, in three rows
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A QSR with a lane, headset crew, and cars stacking at the speaker during the rush | Hi Auto | Drive-thru voice AI with lane hardware is the product, and Kovo does not work a lane |
| A counter, pizza, deli, or multi-brand kitchen where the phone is the order channel and nobody is assigned to it | Kovo | The ticket is the deliverable and the price is published at $99 or $299 |
| Both channels are hurting and you can only buy one this quarter | Kovo, if the phone is unmeasured | The lane already has a timer and a camera; the phone has no baseline to improve from |
The third row is the one operators argue with, and it is the one worth arguing. Fix the channel you cannot see first, because the channel you can see will keep telling you it needs attention either way.
What to ask a lane vendor about the phone
"Does this product answer a phone number, or only the lane?" Ask for the answer in writing, then ask for a live call. A lane recording proves the lane. Phone answering needs its own demonstration, on a phone, with a caller who interrupts.
"When the lane agent takes the order, who answers the phone in the same minute?" This is the staffing question, and it is where a lane deployment quietly moves work rather than removing it. The Kovo vs ConverseNow comparison covers the same QSR split from the drive-thru side, and the comparison hub has the rest of the shortlist if you are pricing both.
Who should pick Hi Auto
Pick Hi Auto if cars stack at the speaker during the rush, because a lane needs a microphone, a confirmation screen, and hardware installed on site, and Kovo does not work a lane.
FAQ
Does Hi Auto answer the restaurant's phone line?
That is the first question to ask, because Hi Auto publishes itself as drive-thru voice AI with hardware and lane integration, and phone ordering is not documented on its public pages. If the phone is what you need answered, confirm in writing that the product answers a standard phone number. 10 minutes on a live call to your own store settles it.
Does Kovo work in a drive-thru lane?
No. Kovo answers the phone number your customers dial, takes the order, reads it back, and tickets it to the POS for $99 or $299 a month. A lane has a microphone, a confirmation screen, and a car waiting on it, and Kovo is not sold for that. If the lane is your bottleneck, the lane product is the right purchase.
Which is cheaper for a shop taking 500 calls a month?
Hi Auto is quote-based, so there is no published number to compare. Kovo is $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, and 500 calls of three minutes is 1,500 minutes, which is the $299 plan. Put that against a written quote at the same call volume, and against about $425 a month of wage for a person to answer those calls.
What happens to a large order on each?
Kovo's limit belongs to the shop. It defaults to 10 items in total and 8 of one item, the owner can change either number or add an order-value limit, and setting one to zero turns it off. Above a limit, the call rings the shop handset if the owner asked for that, and otherwise the agent says the order is too large to send through and keeps taking what fits. Hi Auto does not publish an order cap, so ask what happens when a minivan orders eight combo meals and then adds four more.
Does either product take a card during the call?
Yes, with one caveat. If the shop already holds a card for that caller, Kovo charges it off-session while the caller is still on the line, and the ticket reaches the kitchen during the call. A first-time caller gets a Stripe Checkout link by text and the line is held open until they pay, which vaults the card for the next call. No card number is spoken to the agent on either path. A lane has its own payment step at the window, so ask Hi Auto what happens to payment there.
Final Thoughts
This is less a head-to-head than a question about which channel you are losing orders in. Hi Auto sells the lane, with the hardware and the integration that job needs, and if cars stack at the speaker you already know what that costs. Kovo sells the line the lane leaves alone: a phone answered, an order read back, a ticket in the POS.
Count the two channels before you spend on either. Pull last month's lane timer report and put it next to whatever you have for the phone, which is probably nothing. The gap between those two documents is the purchase.
If the gap is the phone, take a test call with your own menu, because the first hundred calls will tell you more than a demo will.