ääni Launches In London on 28 September 2026

On Monday 28 September 2026, ääni launches in London. From 6:30pm to 8:30pm at Henri, the restaurant at Henrietta Experimental in Covent Garden, a carefully selected group of restaurateurs, hoteliers, operators, innovators and members of the industry press will gather for drinks, light bites, conversation and a first look at ääni, the revenue recovery and conversation intelligence platform for hospitality. The evening is hosted with Jeremy Brown of Brown Onion Consultancy, and it is by invitation only.

 

Before the night arrives, we wanted to set out what the evening is, why we chose to hold it in a restaurant rather than a conference room, and what guests will see, hear and take home; including a gift set worth over £250.

 

ääni is the Finnish word for voice. We chose it because the product begins with the voice on the other end of a phone line, and in hospitality that is where everything begins. Nowhere is that more true than in a restaurant.

Henri is a bistro with chef Jackson Boxer at the helm, at 14 to 15 Henrietta Street inside the Henrietta Experimental hotel. We could have launched ääni in a meeting room or a co-working space. We chose a dining room, because a restaurant is the purest expression of what ääni is for. Hospitality is delivered there in real time, in front of the guest, with no margin for a slow start. That is where ääni does its work and where it will be judged.

 

A restaurant is judged in small, live moments: the greeting at the door, the table you are shown to, the pace of the meal, the goodbye. Very often the first of those moments happens before anyone has met the guest. It is a phone call, taken in the middle of a busy service or missed because the whole team was on the floor. How that call is handled sets the standard for everything that follows. We have written before about why luxury begins on the telephone. Launching inside a restaurant, inside a working hotel, is our way of keeping that truth in front of us, and in front of the people who will form their first opinion of ääni on the night.

ääni is built around the guest journey: before, during and after a stay, a meal or a treatment. As it happens, so is the evening.

 

Every table, every room and every treatment starts with a contact, and for a large share of guests that contact is still a phone call. In a restaurant, that call has a habit of arriving at the worst possible moment: mid-service, in the pre-theatre rush, or after the last cover has left and nobody is there to pick up.

 

When nobody answers, the guest rarely waits, and in Covent Garden there is always another restaurant a few doors along. We have set out the evidence on what an unanswered phone really costs a hospitality business and on the after-hours enquiries most hotels never see, so we will not repeat the figures here.

 

The short version is that the loss is real, it is recurring, and it is mostly invisible, because nobody logs the table that was never booked.

 

ääni Voice is the module that addresses it, and it is live today. It answers every inbound call, 24 hours a day, reads live availability from the property management system the business already uses, confirms reservations, routes food and beverage and service requests to the right people, and hands the call to a member of staff when a guest needs one. Every call answered. Every guest heard.

On the night, guests will see and hear ääni Voice at work in a restaurant setting, and will be able to put their questions directly to the people who built it.

 

They will also see where ääni is going. It is one platform with four modules, and we label the difference between them on this site, so we will do the same here.

 

ääni Voice is live. ääni Coach, the performance layer that scores every answered call against the venue’s own standards and coaches the team, is in build, with commercial launch planned for 2027.

 

ääni Upsell, for proactive pre-arrival, in-stay and post-stay engagement, and ääni Procurement, for automated supplier ordering, are on the roadmap. Upsell will be subscription-only with no commission, so the business keeps 100% of the revenue it generates. You can read the ääni platform overview and see where each module sits on the roadmap before you arrive.

 

None of this is designed to replace the people who make a restaurant or a hotel what it is. ääni takes the calls nobody could get to during service and gives the team back the ones that need a person.

Jeremy Brown is the founder of Brown Onion Consultancy and an advisor to ääni. He co-hosts the evening because he comes at ääni from the operator’s side of the desk, and because he put the problem more plainly than we had managed to:

 

“Your business doesn’t have a demand problem. More precisely, it has a demand capture problem.”

 

Jeremy Brown, Founder, Brown Onion Consultancy

 

That is the conversation we want to have on the 28th. Not a conversation about AI, but about demand that a restaurant or a hotel has already worked hard to generate and is losing somewhere between the ring and the answer.

Guests will leave with a curated collection of gifts and table treats from brands supporting the evening: Ladurée, Rituals, Made Uncommon, Circular&Co., Myte & Boo, Manuscript, Noble Isle, Peppersmith, ARRAN Sense of Scotland and Matere Studio. We are grateful to every one of them, and we have written about each brand and what it has contributed.

 

We included this deliberately. Hospitality is remembered in the details, and the last detail is the one guests carry home. A restaurant that picks up the phone in the middle of a full service and a restaurant that hands you something thoughtful at the door are doing the same thing: paying attention when it would be easier not to. ääni exists to make sure the first of those details is never missed.

The room is small by design. We have invited the people ääni is built for: restaurants and premium multi-site dining groups, independent and boutique hotels, multi-site groups, aparthotels, and spas and salons running on a cloud property management system, across the UK and EMEA, along with members of the hospitality press.

 

We last set out the ääni story in public ahead of Web Summit Lisbon 2025. Since then the focus has narrowed and sharpened: ääni Voice is live, the roadmap is published, and ääni Voice pricing is in the open rather than held back for a sales call.

If you would like to join us at Henri on 28 September, email Senna Baillie at senna@coirconsulting.com with your name, restaurant, property or company and role. Places are limited and the evening is by invitation only, so please do not leave it late.

 

If you cannot be in London that evening, the product does not need a dining room. Book a demo and we will show you ääni Voice on your own phone line, or start with the revenue calculator to estimate what unanswered calls are costing your venue today.

ääni is the revenue recovery and growth platform for hospitality. It is voice-native AI with native PMS integration, built to elevate guest and staff interactions before, during and after a stay. ääni Voice is live; ääni Coach is in build for commercial launch in 2027; ääni Upsell and ääni Procurement are on the roadmap. ääni is built by Coir Consulting Ltd, a UK hospitality technology company founded and led by Senna Baillie. Read more about Coir Consulting or meet the team.

 

Media contact: Senna Baillie, senna@coirconsulting.com.

 

Photography and filming will take place during the event for ääni communications and marketing. Guests who would prefer not to be photographed or filmed can let a member of the ääni team know on arrival.