Kea is live · pricing from $450/mo · last verified 26 Oct 2026 · viability healthy
Kea
Voice AI phone ordering for restaurants that answers unlimited calls and sends tickets to your POS and kitchen KDS
Kea is a defensible buy if your phone is the bottleneck and you run a supported POS. The Menu Analyzer and the AI Judge attack the failure that ruins most restaurant voice agents — invented items and wrong modifiers — and pushing real tickets to your KDS is the difference between a demo and a system. It is restaurant-specific and priced as one flat monthly fee, so high-volume QSR, pizza and sandwich shops get the most out of it. Compare Maple AI, Revmo and Loman on per-call math before you sign; Kea itself publishes that comparison.
Verdict generatedVerified 4d ago · liveness 80/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/kea
- High-volume fast-casual and QSR restaurants missing calls at dinner rush
- Pizza and sandwich shops with heavy modifier and substitution volume
- Multi-location brands (50+ locations) wanting centralized AI management
- Operators on a supported POS recovering missed-order revenue
- Fine-dining rooms where every guest expects a human host
- Low-call-volume spots where a flat fee costs more than per-call pricing
- Operators whose menu isn't digitized or clean enough to ground the AI
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Skip Kea if your phone volume is genuinely low — a flat monthly fee with no per-order costs only pays off once missed calls at rush are a real line item, and per-call rivals like Loman or Revmo will cost less at that volume.
It is one flat monthly fee with no per-order charges, so the risk runs the other way: quiet months still cost the same and there is no per-call rebate when your phone barely rings
A single flat monthly fee with no per-order costs suits high-volume QSR, pizza and sandwich shops where per-call rivals like Loman, Maple AI and Revmo would stack up fast. At low call volume that same flat fee is the expensive option. Multi-location brands at 50+ locations move to custom pricing for bulk editing and brand-wide changes.
In short
Kea — Voice AI phone ordering for restaurants that answers unlimited calls and sends tickets to your POS and kitchen KDS. Best for High-volume fast-casual and QSR restaurants missing calls at dinner rush, Pizza and sandwich shops with heavy modifier and substitution volume, Multi-location brands (50+ locations) wanting centralized AI management. Plans from $450/mo.
No head-to-head comparison for Kea yet — the alternatives below are the closest matches we list.
What is Kea?
Kea — Voice AI phone ordering for restaurants that answers unlimited calls and sends tickets to your POS and kitchen KDS. Best for High-volume fast-casual and QSR restaurants missing calls at dinner rush, Pizza and sandwich shops with heavy modifier and substitution volume, Multi-location brands (50+ locations) wanting centralized AI management. Plans from $450/mo.
Kea is voice AI phone ordering built by restaurateurs for restaurants. You point your calls at a dedicated Kea number and the AI answers as many callers as the dinner rush throws at it — no hold queue, no busy signal — taking orders with modifiers and substitutions and pushing tickets straight to your kitchen KDS through direct POS integrations including Toast, Square, Clover and Olo. The vendor says you can connect your menu in under 15 minutes once your POS is linked. What separates Kea from a generic answering bot is menu grounding. The AI Menu Analyzer keeps the agent inside your actual curated menu — the vendor's example is no hallucinated 10 ketchups — and the AI Judge checks each order against the live menu before it reaches the kitchen, a claimed 99.3% accuracy. The Food Critic layer tells callers when something is 86'd, what modifier limits apply, and answers policy FAQs, flagging unsupported customizations for you. Kea also covers SMS: Text AI lets guests order, ask questions or pay over text. Payments run through credit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay, pickup and third-party delivery are handled in one flow, and reservations, waitlists, holiday hours and spam calls all sit on the same line. You get real-time call reporting and a daily Data Guru SMS digest of calls handled and order revenue saved. It is one flat price with no per-order fees, which the vendor cites at an average $677/month in recovered missed-order revenue per restaurant — a vendor figure, not an independent audit.
Key features
- Voice AI ordering that takes modifiers and follows menu rules
- Unlimited concurrent calls on a dedicated Kea number
- Direct POS connection with tickets printing to your kitchen KDS
- AI Menu Analyzer grounds the agent in your curated menu
- AI Judge cross-checks every order against the live menu (vendor-claimed 99.3% accuracy)
- Food Critic surfaces 86'd items, modifier limits and FAQs to callers in real time
- Flagging of unsupported customizations with special instructions passed to you
- Text AI — ordering, questions and payment over SMS
- Payments by credit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay
- Self-delivery and third-party delivery handled in one order flow
- Order throttling when kitchen tickets back up
- Reservation and waitlist handling on the AI line
- Location and holiday hours management
- Spam call handling on the Kea number
- Real-time AI call reporting and revenue trend analysis
Behind the verdict
Kea's strongest idea is that a voice agent is only as good as its menu. Most restaurant phone bots fail on the edges — the caller wants jalapeños you don't offer, the pepperoni is 86'd, the pizza is half-and-half with two upcharges. Kea answers that with three named layers: the AI Menu Analyzer grounds the agent in your curated menu so it reads real item names and modifier rules instead of improvising; the AI Judge cross-checks the finished order against the live menu at a vendor-claimed 99.3% accuracy; and the Food Critic tells the caller when something is out and flags customizations the menu doesn't support. That is a sensible architecture, and it is the part worth evaluating in a live test call rather than on a spec sheet. The second strength is that this is an ordering system, not a message-taker. Tickets go straight to the POS and kitchen KDS through direct integrations — Toast, Square, Clover and Olo are the ones Kea names, with the site claiming 11+ direct POS connections. Payments run on the call through credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and self-delivery and third-party delivery are handled in one flow. Order throttling kicks in when tickets back up, which matters more than any accuracy figure on a Friday night. Around the order itself you get reservations and waitlists, location and holiday hours, spam call handling, dynamic greetings you can edit from your phone with changes live on the next call, real-time call reporting, and a daily Data Guru SMS digest of calls handled and revenue saved. Where to be careful. Kea is narrow by design — restaurants only. If you want a general voice assistant for a clinic or a law office, this is the wrong shape of product. It assumes your menu is digitized and clean; a menu that lives in a manager's head will not ground the AI Menu Analyzer. The $677/month average recovered-revenue figure and the 99.3% accuracy number are both vendor-cited and unaudited, so build your own call-volume math before you commit. Volume is the whole pricing question: a flat fee with no per-order costs rewards a busy phone line and looks expensive on a quiet one, and Kea's own published comparisons against Loman, Maple AI and Revmo are the right place to start that arithmetic. Setup is quoted at about 30 minutes on the sit, with the onboarding path being create account, add location, connect your POS, point your forwarded calls at the Kea number — and 50+ location brands get bulk editing and brand-wide changes the vendor describes as two clicks.
Models under the hood
as of 2026-10-22
Limitations
- Kea is purpose-built for restaurants rather than a general voice assistant — phone and text ordering, payments, reservations, waitlists, hours and spam handling.
- It grounds the agent in a curated menu, so it assumes your menu is digitized and maintained; a messy menu weakens the whole system.
- The 99.3% AI Judge accuracy claim and the $677/month average recovered-order revenue figure are both vendor-cited and not independently audited.
- Pricing is one flat fee with no per-order costs, which rewards high call volume and looks expensive at low volume against per-call rivals like Loman, Maple AI and Revmo.
as of 2026-10-21
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Is Kea still active?
Kea is live · pricing from $450/mo · last verified 26 Oct 2026 · viability healthy.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is Kea? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →What's new in Kea
Checked 9 days agoAcross the latest 4 updates: 4 news mentions.
Restaurant Phone Ordering System: The 2026 Operator's Guide
Kea published a 2026 operator's guide to restaurant phone ordering systems, covering how operators should evaluate and deploy phone ordering.
Kea AI on the best Loman alternative for restaurants
Kea published a comparison positioning itself as an alternative to Loman for restaurant phone answering.
Restaurant Phone Answering Service: The 2026 Operator's Guide
Kea published a 2026 guide to restaurant phone answering services for operators.
AI Answering Service for Restaurants
Kea published a comparison of cost, ROI and reservations across AI answering services for restaurants.
What do users say about Kea?
What people actually say about Kea — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
ResearchedDiscussed by users across 5 sources (Hacker News, Product Hunt, App Store, Stack Overflow, Lemmy) · researched Oct 8, 2026.
Weighted by the 65 posts each of 5 sources contributed.
- +Unlimited concurrent calls means the dinner-rush phone never goes to voicemail
- +Modifier-aware ordering (extra-crispy, substitutions) is exactly what pizza and sandwich shops need
- +11+ direct POS integrations including Toast, Square, Clover, and Olo cut manual ticket entry
- +AI Menu Analyzer grounding the agent in your real menu targets the classic 'invented item' failure
- +86'd-item detection with substitution suggestions helps callers order around outages in real time
- −No genuine independent restaurant-operator feedback found anywhere in the scraped data
- −The 99.3% accuracy claim is vendor-stated and untested by third parties
- −Reddit, YouTube, Bluesky, GitHub, and Trustpilot returned zero data — no real-world proof
- −POS edge cases (custom modifiers, combos) can silently break the whole ticket flow
- −Accent and noisy-background handling at peak is the classic weak spot for voice ordering AI
- • Payment processing fees on credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay orders
- • Setup/onboarding labor if POS modifier mapping is complex
- • Per-order or overage charges at very high call volume not clearly published
- • Potential per-location fees for multi-site brands beyond the base tier
How we verified this
Every listed fact about Kea— pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 26 Oct 2026. Pages mix model-assisted synthesis with human review; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified Kea 21 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed who it suits, switching out, integrations, switching in, description, setup time, pricing fit, features, pricing tiers, who should skip it, hidden costs, limitations, use cases, summary, our verdict
- — changed summary, our verdict, description, pricing tiers, features
- — changed platforms, limitations
- — changed use cases, who it suits, description, our verdict, features, hidden costs, limitations, switching in, switching out, who should skip it, pricing fit, setup time, summary
- — changed description, summary, who should skip it, our verdict, features, pricing tiers, who it suits, integrations
- — changed domain expiry
Showing the 6 most recent of 21 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does Kea cost in 2026?
Kea: Plans from $450/mo. Pricing last verified 26 Oct 2026.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Kea's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
A single flat monthly fee with no per-order costs suits high-volume QSR, pizza and sandwich shops where per-call rivals like Loman, Maple AI and Revmo would stack up fast. At low call volume that same flat fee is the expensive option. Multi-location brands at 50+ locations move to custom pricing for bulk editing and brand-wide changes.
Has Kea's pricing changed?
No plan price for Kea has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick Kea?
Pick Kea if you are High-volume fast-casual and QSR restaurants missing calls at dinner rush, Pizza and sandwich shops with heavy modifier and substitution volume, Multi-location brands (50+ locations) wanting centralized AI management, Operators on a supported POS recovering missed-order revenue.
Look elsewhere if you are Fine-dining rooms where every guest expects a human host, Low-call-volume spots where a flat fee costs more than per-call pricing, Operators whose menu isn't digitized or clean enough to ground the AI, Concepts that can't forward their main number to a dedicated Kea line.
Skip it if Skip Kea if your phone volume is genuinely low — a flat monthly fee with no per-order costs only pays off once missed calls at rush are a real line item, and per-call rivals like Loman or Revmo will cost less at that volume.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Kea actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Friday dinner rush, four lines ringing at once. Kea answers all of them on the dedicated number, reads the real menu including half-and-half and extra-crispy modifiers, and the AI Judge checks each order before the ticket prints to the kitchen KDS. When the kitchen backs up, order throttling slows intake.
Outcome: No caller hits a busy signal, no invented items reach the kitchen, and the morning Data Guru SMS shows how many calls were handled and what order revenue was saved.
Calls after close go to Kea. The Food Critic tells callers what is 86'd and what modifier limits apply, guests who would rather text open Text AI and order or pay by Apple Pay or Google Pay over SMS.
Outcome: After-hours and text orders are captured instead of lost to voicemail, and the next morning's call report shows the demand you would otherwise have missed.
A seasonal menu change or a brand-wide holiday hours update is applied with bulk editing rather than store by store, and the change goes live across locations.
Outcome: Brand-wide changes the vendor describes as two clicks instead of 50 individual portal edits, with each store still handling its own reservations and waitlist on the same AI line.
Use cases
- Answering every dinner-rush phone call at once without adding staff
- Capturing after-hours orders when the dining room is closed
- Handling pizza and sandwich orders with heavy modifiers and substitutions
- Letting guests order, ask questions or pay by text instead of calling
- Running reservations and waitlists on the same AI phone line
- Keeping callers current on 86'd items and modifier limits automatically
- Centralizing AI settings across 50+ locations with bulk edits
- Taking card, Apple Pay and Google Pay payment on the call or by text
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Kea — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Kea quotes about 30 minutes to activate. The onboarding path is create your account and add location details, connect your POS (the site says menu connection takes under 15 minutes), forward calls to your dedicated Kea number, then go live. Changes you make in the mobile portal apply on the very next call.
Switching to or from Kea
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From a human answering service: forward your existing number to the dedicated Kea line instead of routing to the call center, then connect your POS
- →From voicemail or an unanswered line: connect the POS, forward calls to Kea, and let the AI handle after-hours and rush overflow
- →From per-call voice AI rivals like Loman, Maple AI or Revmo: connect the POS and forward calls to Kea, then compare a month of call reporting against your old per-call invoices
- ↗To a per-call voice AI service: export your menu and call reporting, point your forwarded number at the new provider, and expect the flat-fee advantage to reverse at low volume
- ↗To a human answering service: disconnect the Kea number from your POS and re-route forwarding to the service's line
Integrations
Resources & guides
- Documentationkea.ai
Docs
Full product docs from kea.ai
- Resourcekea.ai
Blog
Explore how restaurants use Voice AI to boost revenue, never miss a call, and deliver exceptional guest experiences
- Resourcekea.ai
Resources
Explore how restaurants use Voice AI to boost revenue, never miss a call, and deliver exceptional guest experiences
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Kea”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Kea” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Kea.
Official links
What are the best Kea alternatives?
The closest alternatives to Kea we list are SoundHound for Restaurants, Converse Now and Slang.ai. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| SoundHound for Restaurants | Contact Sales | Custom pricing | — |
| Converse Now | Contact Sales | Custom pricing | — |
| Slang.ai | Paid | Pricing not published | — |
Alternatives to Kea
View all
SoundHound for Restaurants
Voice AI for restaurants that takes drive-thru, phone, SMS, kiosk and in-car orders across every location.
Converse Now
Voice AI that answers restaurant phone, drive-thru, text and kiosk orders in your brand's voice.
Tools that pair well with Kea
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Kea, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
SoundHound for Restaurants
Voice AI for restaurants that takes drive-thru, phone, SMS, kiosk and in-car orders across every location.
Converse Now
Voice AI that answers restaurant phone, drive-thru, text and kiosk orders in your brand's voice.
Slang.ai
Slang AI is a voice AI phone host for restaurants that answers calls 24/7, books reservations and routes VIPs to staff.
Frequently asked questions
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