ääni Steps Out! What We Heard at the London Launch

On Monday 28 September we gathered a room of hoteliers, restaurateurs, technologists and consultants at Henri, the bistro on the ground floor of the Henrietta Experimental hotel in Covent Garden, and asked them to do something slightly unusual for a product launch. We asked them to pick up the phone.

 

That was the point of choosing a bistro over a conference room. ääni Voice earns its keep on the phone lines of hotels and restaurants, where calls arrive in the middle of service and compete with everything else going on. Launching in a restaurant on a Monday evening, with a kitchen working behind us, put the demo in the kind of setting it was built for. The room was small by design and everything felt very relaxed and warm.

 

Lydia Berry of Waymaker Consulting described it afterwards as “very warm conversation and laughs” and “so much fun and not a boring corporate affair”. We’ll take that.

 

We invited people who deal with the problem ääni addresses every day: operators from London restaurant groups, independent and group hotels, hospitality technology companies and a handful of consultants who advise all of the above. Jeremy Brown of Brown Onion Consultancy co-hosted the evening with us, as he has advised ääni since the early days. We also had a professional golfer in attendance, which nobody planned and everybody enjoyed.

 

What struck us was how quickly the conversation moved past the product. People wanted to talk about guest experience, about direct bookings, about where the phone sits in a guest’s journey now that so much happens on a screen first. ääni was the prompt, not the subject. That felt like the right way round.

 

A demo can only ever show a slice of what a system does, and ours was no exception. Even so, three moments from the evening have stayed with us because each one made a different point about why the phone still carries so much commercial weight.

 

One of the calls on the night came from someone who was leaning towards booking through an online travel agent. ääni answered, checked availability, talked through the options and, without any hard sell, kept the caller inside the hotel’s direct booking journey.

 

If you run an independent property you already know what that is worth. Cloudbeds’ 2026 State of Independent Hotels report, drawn from 90 million bookings, found that OTAs took 63.4% of independent hotel bookings in 2025, up two points on the year before (Cloudbeds). Each of those bookings typically costs the property between 15% and 25% in commission (Lighthouse). The phone is one of the few places where you can still change a guest’s mind in the moment, provided somebody answers it.

 

That is the whole commercial case for ääni Voice in one call. Not the technology; the timing.

 

The moment that drew the strongest reaction was the language switch. A caller spoke in a language other than English, ääni recognised it and carried on the conversation in that language. There was a pause in the room, then a lot of questions.

 

For a London hotel, or any property with international guests, this is less a novelty than a relief. A guest who can book, ask about breakfast or arrange a late check-out in their own language is a guest who feels looked after before they’ve arrived. We’ve been careful about describing language capability publicly until we were confident it was ready; after Monday, and after confirming the detail with our development team, we’re comfortable saying it’s live.

 

One guest, having spoken to ääni for a minute or two, told us the experience was “like talking to his wife”. It got the biggest laugh of the evening, and his wife, we’re assured, took it as the compliment it was intended to be.

 

Underneath the joke there was a serious observation. The interaction felt natural enough that he stopped listening for the seams. That is the standard we set ourselves, because a guest who hears a robot hangs up, while a guest who hears a conversation stays on the line. Where a call needs a member of staff, ääni hands it over; the point is that your team gets back the calls that need them and loses the ones that don’t.

 

The questions ran in a few consistent directions. How does ääni read live availability from the property management system? What happens to a call ääni can’t resolve? What’s live now and what’s still to come?

 

The answers, for anyone who wasn’t there, are these. ääni Voice is live today: it answers inbound calls around the clock, reads live PMS availability, confirms reservations, routes food and beverage and service requests, and passes a call to your team when a person is needed. ääni Coach is in build, with commercial launch planned for 2027; it will score answered calls against your own standards and coach the team from real conversations. ääni Upsell and ääni Procurement are on the roadmap. You can see where each module sits on the ääni platform overview.

 

Every guest left with a gift collection put together by brands who wanted to be part of the evening. We’ve thanked them properly in our previous article and we’ll say it again here: thank you.

 

An evening like this takes more people than the ones at the front of the room. Our thanks go to the team at Henri, who looked after us and our guests while running a Monday service. To Jeremy Brown, for co-hosting and for lending the evening his credibility with operators. To Paul Cunningham, our advisor and strategist, and Colin Etwaroo, our fractional CTO, who were in the room answering the harder questions. To Deborah and Roger for everything behind the scenes. To Pavel and the development team, who made sure ääni Voice was ready to take calls in front of an audience. To Zoe Plummer, the photographer and to every guest who gave up their Monday evening and brought such good energy with them.

 

Senna Baillie, our founder, wrote to the team the following morning that “this felt like ääni properly stepping out into the world”. Her note ended with a line we agree with entirely: “the event was really just the beginning.”

 

Ten follow-up meetings were booked from conversations on the night, several projects are now being discussed, and a number of introductions have come directly from people who were in the room. Interest has also arrived from people who weren’t.

 

Jeremy put the underlying argument well in our invitation: “Your business doesn’t have a demand problem. More precisely, it has a demand capture problem.” On Monday a room full of operators watched demand being captured one call at a time, and then booked time to talk about doing the same on their own lines.

 

If you’d like to hear what your callers would hear, book a demo and we’ll run ääni Voice against your property’s details. If you’d rather start with the numbers, the revenue calculator will give you an estimate of what unanswered calls are costing you now. Either way, we’d like to continue the conversation we started at Henri.