MyAutobot, the Sheffield AI company, has gone live as an official integration inside Eat App. Restaurants on the platform can now switch on an AI voice agent that answers the phone around the clock, takes the booking in a natural voice, and writes it into their Eat App diary while the call is still happening.
Disclosure before I go further. MyAutobot is my company, and The North is published by FU7URE, which I also run. I’ve written this up the way I’d write anyone else’s deal, and you should read it knowing whose deal it is.
What Eat App is
Eat App is a reservation, table management, CRM and marketing platform built for restaurants. It was founded in 2014, is headquartered in Dubai, and according to the integration listing it’s used by more than 5,000 restaurants across 90+ countries.
Those are the platform’s own figures rather than independently audited ones, so read them as the company’s claim.
What the agent actually does
New reservations go into the live Eat App calendar as the call happens, so there’s no rekeying and no end-of-shift catch-up. The agent also modifies and cancels existing bookings against live availability, which is the harder half of the job.
It answers the questions that pull staff off the floor: opening hours, dress code, dietary requirements, parking, directions, set menus. When a restaurant is full it takes wait-list requests and triggers Eat App callbacks. Complex calls escalate to a person with the full conversation attached, so nobody has to repeat themselves. It works in 30+ languages.
Set-up runs to about ten minutes, with customisation to a specific restaurant taking around a day. Connecting a SIP or telephony service is optional and can take longer.
Why the phone is worth bothering with
Every other part of hospitality has been digitised and measured to death. Online booking, delivery, EPOS, table management, stock, rotas. The phone has largely been left where it was, ringing out during a busy service while the people who could answer it are carrying plates.
A call is about the highest-intent contact a restaurant gets. Someone dialling a restaurant usually wants a table. Miss it and the booking goes to whoever picks up instead.
I’m a strong believer that a voice agent which can’t write to your diary is a novelty. One that can is a member of staff. That difference is the whole reason this was worth building rather than bolting a chatbot onto the front of a phone line.
The Northern angle
This is a Sheffield business shipping software into restaurants in ninety-odd countries from a city better known for steel than for voice AI.
That’s the part worth noticing for anyone tracking the region’s digital cluster. Sheffield already has two of the country’s stronger AI search agencies and a serious advanced manufacturing base. Software that gets embedded inside somebody else’s global platform is a different kind of export, and there isn’t much of it coming out of the North.
If you run a restaurant on Eat App, it’s in your admin now under Integrations. Go and try to catch it out. That’s the fastest way to know whether it’s any good.
The North is FU7URE’s briefing on the people, capital and infrastructure reshaping the North of England. Subscribe to the free newsletter to get it in your inbox.
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