AI phone answering for restaurants — handling noise, accents, and chaos

Building AI phone answering for restaurants taught us things dental/office use cases didn't:

1. Background noise is extreme — kitchen during Friday service vs quiet dental reception
2. Menu knowledge — the AI needs to know your specials, allergens, and what's 86'd tonight
3. Reservation logic — table sizes, seatings, private rooms, group minimums
4. Accent diversity — Dublin restaurants get calls in many accents + languages

The speech recognition challenge alone was interesting. We had to fine-tune noise cancellation for restaurant-specific frequencies (clanging, sizzling, music).

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