Kovo vs Presto: Which Fits Your Restaurant?
Presto sells drive-thru and kiosk automation. Kovo answers the phone line. Compare the channels, the ticket path, and which gap in a QSR costs more per week.
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The kiosk in the lobby has a photograph of every item, a price, and a button that says add. The phone by the pass has none of that, and the person holding it is also bagging.
That asymmetry is the whole Presto versus Kovo question. Presto sells drive-thru and kiosk automation: hardware in the lane, screens in the lobby, self-service ordering on a quote (published positioning, October 2026). Kovo sells the channel with no screen at all, where the caller has to be told what the bowl is and whether the fryer is shared.
A QSR can want both. It rarely buys them from one vendor, and the order matters more than the comparison table.
TL;DR
- Kovo answers the restaurant's phone from $99 a month for 750 connected minutes, reads the order back, and tickets it to the POS.
- Presto sells drive-thru and kiosk automation with hardware, on a quote; phone ordering is not part of its published positioning.
- A store doing 900 orders a week with 15% on the phone takes 135 calls a week, which at a $38 ticket is $5,130 of weekly revenue on one handset.
- That is about 585 calls a month, or 1,755 connected minutes at three minutes each: Kovo's $299 plan, about $70 a week.
- If the purchase is self-service in the building, buy Presto. If it is the caller, Kovo starts at $99 with 14 days free.
What each product is
Kovo answers the handset rather than the screen. Callers order out loud, the agent reads the ticket back, and the finished order prints at Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson or Star receipt printer. One subscription covers one store.
The order survives a menu that was never designed for voice: nested choice groups are supported, half-and-half opens its own groups on each half, and a lexicon maps how a caller says an item onto the catalog. The menu refreshes once a day in the background, so an answered call never waits on a vendor.
With cards on, Kovo charges the card the shop already holds, off-session, while the caller is still talking, so the ticket reaches the kitchen during the call; a first-time caller gets a texted link with the line held open, and no card number is spoken to the agent or recorded. It books tables too, in its own book. The order limit is the shop's: defaults 10 items in total and 8 of one item, changeable either way, with an optional value limit and zero meaning off. The price is published: $99 for 750 connected minutes a month, $299 for 5,000. Calls under 10 seconds are never billed, no call bills past 12 minutes, and there is no overage, because calls forward to your own phone at the cap.
Presto sells drive-thru voice AI and kiosk automation, with the hardware and the lane integration that come with it, on a quote. The product is aimed at quick-service and fast-casual operators who want to move order-taking into a screen, at the speaker or in the lobby.
That is a site installation. It involves hardware on a counter, a menu that has to be built for a touchscreen, and a store that has to change how the front counter works (published positioning, October 2026). What a phone buyer needs is not on the public pages: whether the product answers a phone number, what it costs per location, and how a phone order would reach the POS. Ask all three, and get the first one in writing.
The 30-second comparison
Published information, October 2026. These products do not overlap much, so several rows are a description rather than a contest.
| Kovo | Presto | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $99/mo for 750 connected minutes | Quote-based; hardware included in the quote |
| Channel | The phone number customers dial; no kiosk or lane product | The drive-thru lane and the lobby kiosk |
| What the call ends with | Order read back, ticket written to the POS | Self-service order placed on a screen, 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 during the call; link held open for a first-time caller | Payment at the kiosk or the window |
| Reservations | Kovo's own book; an OpenTable or Resy page is read out and texted | Not applicable to a kiosk or lane |
| Order limit | The shop's own; defaults 10 items and 8 of one item, optional value limit | Not published — confirm |
| Setup | Self-serve: import menu, take a test call | Hardware installation, per the vendor; timeline not published |
Read the "channel" row twice. Everything after it is downstream of where the customer is standing.
A kiosk can see the menu, a caller can't
A kiosk customer browses. They see a photograph, a price, a size, and a row of modifiers, and they tap until the order looks right. The screen answers questions nobody had to ask out loud.
A phone caller has no screen. They ask whether the chicken is breaded, whether the kids meal includes a drink, how spicy the sauce is, and whether the fries come with it. Every one of those is a question the agent has to answer from the menu, and the order only proceeds when the answer is right.
That is why a phone system has to know the menu differently from a kiosk system. A kiosk needs a layout. A phone agent needs the item's description, its option groups, and the ability to say what it does not know instead of guessing.
Kovo's menu model handles the groups and the caller vocabulary, from first-party knowledge only: the shop's own site, menu, FAQs, and hours, refreshed daily. Whether Presto's stack does any of that for a phone caller is a question for the demo, because the public pages are about screens and lanes.
The pizzeria guide has the menu-question list that breaks phone agents most often, which is a decent script for either test.
The phone's share of a week
Take a store doing 900 orders a week, with 15% arriving by phone. That is a guess you can correct from your own numbers in 10 minutes.
- 900 orders × 15% = 135 phone calls a week.
- 135 calls × $38 average ticket = $5,130 of weekly revenue on one handset.
- 135 calls a week is about 585 a month; at three minutes each that is 1,755 connected minutes.
Kovo's $299 plan covers 5,000 minutes, so it is the plan, and $299 a month is about $70 a week against that $5,130. The pricing page shows the plan arithmetic. Phone tickets are estimated between roughly $32 and $48 depending on the source, and online tickets between roughly $41 and $44, with Slice's platform data putting online orders 18–20% larger at independent pizzerias.
That last line is worth sitting with before writing the phone off. The channel with the worst data and the smallest ticket is also the channel where a caller is already committed enough to dial.
The decision, in three rows
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A QSR with a lane and a lobby, buying self-service ordering and hardware in one contract | Presto | Kiosk and lane automation with installation is the product, and Kovo does not put a screen on the counter |
| A pizza, deli, or wing shop where the caller asks questions before ordering and the ticket must print without retyping | Kovo | Order read-back and a ticket to the POS you already run, from $99 |
| Kiosks already installed, and the rush still loses calls because nobody is free to pick up the handset | Kovo | A kiosk does not answer a phone; the two channels need two products |
The second and third rows are the same purchase at different stages. The kiosk changes the queue in the lobby, not the ring at the counter.
Who should pick Presto
Pick Presto if the self-service order is the project and the store can absorb hardware on the counter, a touchscreen menu, and a new front-counter routine in one contract.
Two questions for either demo
"A caller asks what comes on the mac and cheese, and whether the side can be swapped. What does the product say?" Kovo answers from the shop's own site, menu, and FAQs, so the answer is only as good as what you publish. On allergens it repeats your note back word for word with a disclaimer and tells the caller to confirm with the kitchen, and it never says a dish is safe, so a real allergy still reaches a person. Ask Presto the same question about its kiosk and its lane, because an agent that improvises an ingredient answer is a liability.
"Show me the ticket, not the screen." For a kiosk, that means the kitchen chit from a real order with a modification. For a phone agent, it means the printed order after the caller changes their mind. The Toast walkthrough shows the shape of the second one.
FAQ
Does Presto answer the phone?
Presto publishes itself as drive-thru and kiosk automation, with hardware and lane integration, sold on a quote. Phone ordering is not documented on its public pages, so ask whether the product answers a standard phone number at all, and ask for a live call rather than a recorded kiosk session. 10 minutes on your own menu ends the evaluation quickly if the answer is no.
Does Kovo replace a kiosk?
No. Kovo answers the phone number your customers dial and takes the order verbally, with a read-back before it is placed, from $99 a month. A kiosk is a screen in the lobby where the customer taps through their own order, and the two solve different problems. A shop can run both, and most will, because the caller is not walking to the lobby to order.
Which costs less at 135 phone calls a week?
Presto is quote-based with hardware, so there is no published number to set beside Kovo's. Kovo is $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, and 135 calls a week is about 585 a month, which is 1,755 minutes at three minutes a call. That is the Unlimited plan at $299, or about $70 a week against roughly $5,130 a week of phone revenue.
What happens to a phone order the agent cannot ticket?
The limit is the shop's own. The defaults are 10 items in total and 8 of one item, an owner can change either or add an order-value limit, and zero turns a limit off. Above one, the call rings the shop handset if the owner turned on large-party routing; otherwise the agent says the order is too large to send through and keeps taking what fits on the same call. Presto publishes no phone order limit, so ask what its lane and kiosk products do with an order a person would normally take.
Can Kovo take a card or book a table?
Both, with one line each. A card the shop already holds is charged off-session while the caller is still on the line, and a first-time caller gets a Stripe link with the line held open, so no card number ever reaches the call or the transcript. Tables go into Kovo's own reservation book, not into OpenTable or Resy. Orders over the shop's own limit are handled as above, whichever payment path is set. A kiosk takes payment at the screen and a lane takes it at the window, which are different workflows.
Final Thoughts
Presto sells the customer who is standing in front of a screen. Kovo sells the customer who is driving, holding a phone, and asking what comes on the sandwich. Those are two channels, and a store with a lane and a handset needs a decision on each rather than a winner between them. If the shortlist is other voice agents rather than kiosks, the Kovo vs ConverseNow comparison takes the high-volume QSR case from the operations side, and the comparison hub has the rest of the field.
Count the phone's share this week before you sign anything, because it is the only channel with no dashboard behind it. Then run one call with your own menu, a modifier, and a change of mind. Take a test call with your own menu and listen to the read-back before you pay for anything.