a chat on your site can answer "are you open sunday" and "do you have a vegan option" while you're busy. but only if it's reading the menu you have now, not the one from the spring.
it's free if you run your own copy of retune. that means retune runs on your own computer, with an agent that builds what you ask for. email me for that, or sign up and start on retune today.
the business in the video is hillside coffee, a coffee shop. i made it up to show the feature. it's a price that changes there, but a menu page works the same way.
your website is a source in the bot's sync tab. you pick how often the bot reads it again: every hour, every 6 hours, daily or weekly.
say you change the fish special on tuesday afternoon. with a daily sync, the bot has the new special after the next run, so within a day. with every hour, within the hour. and if you want it right now, hit sync now.
on each run, the bot only reads again the pages that changed. the run says how many pages changed, and you can open a diff of each one. your old menu is in red, the new one in green. so you can see the bot picked up the right thing.
if you take a page down, like a summer menu, the bot drops it too. ask about it after that, and the bot says it doesn't know.
on a phone, tapping a button is easier than typing a question. you can give the bot starter buttons like "today's specials" and "hours", and it suggests a next question after each answer. and if what bothers you most is the phone ringing after you close, there's a page about exactly that.
when you make the bot, pick "restaurant host" in the templates and add your restaurant's name and a few lines about it. you get a bot with a greeting and instructions for a restaurant, and then you point the sync tab at your site.
one thing to know. what you type into the template goes into the bot's instructions, not into the pages it reads. the sync doesn't change those. so keep the menu and the hours on your website, and keep the template notes to things that don't change, like your name.
it fits if your menu and hours are text on your web pages. that's what the bot reads.
it won't help much if your menu is a pdf or a photo. the bot reads web pages, not files or pictures, so it would only see the page around them. if you can, put the menu on the page as text.
it answers questions. it doesn't take orders, and it isn't connected to your till or an ordering app. retune has a booking feature, but it books one appointment per time slot on your own calendar. there's no party size or table count, so i wouldn't use it for reservations.
it reads the pages on your site that your home page links to. a menu page that's linked from the home page gets covered. a page that isn't linked from there needs its own source in the sync tab.
about allergies: the bot only knows what your menu page says. if a guest has a serious allergy, it's safer that they ask you. you can add a line to the bot's instructions, like "if someone asks about a serious allergy, ask them to call us." then try it in a test chat.
the sync keeps the old and new text of each changed page, so the diff can show it. that's your own site's text, in your retune account. if your site is down during a run, the bot keeps the menu it had.
olive