Why We Built HostBuddy?

Why We Built HostBuddy?

In my family, we constantly text each other, because it's fun and fast. Olive Garden famously said, “when you are here, you are a family”. For restaurants to cozy up with consumers like their family, they should leverage SMS/texting.
In the last decade, every restaurant brand built an app, consumers rarely download an app, even if they have downloaded for a promotion, they will delete it soon. Users call the business when they are in a hurry or rely on aggregator apps like DoorDash, which typically charge restaurants for each order, and also menu prices are spiked for the consumer to pay extra.

Restaurants have labor shortages and staff are over extended, they don't have time to answer phones or engage in chat to answer a question. Hence we built automated conversations over SMS and phone lines, while leveraging advances in Large language models (LLM) to the reach of every small business while seamlessly integrating with sellers existing workflow over POS.

Onboarding

Create Account on HostBuddy

We make it super simple, use Google Login to instanlty create an account on HostBuddy or use signup form [here]

1. Connect your Square account: Once you log into HostBuddy you will be redirected to connect your Square account in the integrations page. Use Square oAuth credentials to authorize HostBuddy app.
2. Permissions and security: We need permission to read your item library, create orders, update customer information etc.

Once Square seller authorizes the hostbuddy, you will see a screen like shown, at this point - we are basically downloading your item library, so that agent can converse on your behalf. As you are aware LLM needs to be fine tuned for your business data (menu, modifiers) etc and grounded so that it doesn’t hallucinate. It takes us one business day to secure a telephone number to your business within your location telephone area code. We will keep you updated throughout the process through email.

We use transformer based neural networks as base model and fine tuned with RLHF, one of the gold standards for accuracy and safety. Upon receiving your agent for use, you can login and test in the agent play ground or from your own phone.