Trust & compliance
Your callers know what they are talking to, and how to leave.
Everything below happens in the first six seconds of a call, or the moment a caller asks for help.
43%
rank transparency as the single biggest AI trust factor
About three times any other factor. 44% say AI goes too far when you cannot easily reach a person.
62%
would rather order from a person than an AI persona
Which is exactly why Mesa hands over the moment a caller wants a human.
It says what it is, before it asks anything.
Every Mesa call opens by identifying itself as an assistant and naming the venue. No human name, no ambiguous greeting, nothing a caller discovers halfway through and feels foolish about.
The opening line, every call
“Thanks for calling. You are through to the assistant and this call is recorded. What can I do for you?”
The wording is yours to change. The disclosure and the recording notice are not optional, and neither can be switched off in the workflow builder.
No impersonation
Mesa never claims to be a member of your team and never answers “are you a real person” with anything other than no.
Outbound says why it called
A confirmation or win-back call opens with the venue, the reason for the call, and how to stop getting them.
Consent follows the caller, not the server.
Recording law is decided by where the person on the phone is sitting. A server in Sydney does not make a Californian caller a one-party consent case, and getting that backwards is how a recording becomes inadmissible and a headline at the same time.
The notice is in the greeting
Recording is disclosed in the first sentence, before the caller has said anything worth capturing. On by default, never buried in a menu.
Two-party jurisdictions get two-party treatment
Where the caller's jurisdiction requires all parties to agree, the greeting asks and the answer is honoured. Decline and the call continues without a recording, or goes to a person if you would rather handle it that way.
You decide what is kept and for how long
Recordings, transcripts and outcomes live in your account under your retention setting. Deletion requests are yours to action and do not route through us.
Card details stay out of the transcript
Payment goes through your existing provider on the path it already takes. Card numbers are not read back, not stored in the transcript, and not passed to a model.
A person is always one sentence away.
62% of diners would rather order from a person than an AI persona, which is the whole reason the handover is a guarantee rather than a fallback. The transfer carries what has already been said, so nobody repeats themselves to your host.
would rather order from a person than an AI persona (National Restaurant Association, 2026)
The caller asks
“Can I speak to someone” works at any point in the call, including mid-order. There is no menu to escape and no second confirmation.
The same thing goes wrong twice
Two failed attempts at the same step and the call goes to a person rather than a third attempt. Repeated confusion is the signal that the workflow was the wrong tool.
It falls outside the workflow
A complaint, a supplier, a lost property call, anything the workflow was not built for. Mesa does not improvise around the edge of what it was given.
A person should decide it
A refund, a comp, a dispute, an allergy question your kitchen has to answer. Mesa passes those on with the conversation attached so nobody starts over.
Where a call transfers and nobody picks up, it falls back to wherever it went before Mesa existed. A failed workflow leaves you exactly where you started rather than with a dead line.
Your keys, your infrastructure, your calls.
Mesa runs on the open-source Dograh engine under a BSD-2 licence. Nothing proprietary sits in the path of your calls, so there is no component you cannot inspect and no lever we can pull that you cannot.
Self-hosted is a real option
Run the whole thing on your own servers. Call audio and guest data never leave your infrastructure, and nothing about how a call is handled is hidden.
Bring your own keys
Your own model, voice and transcription accounts. You see the real provider bill with no markup, and you can change a voice or a model without asking us.
The phone number stays yours
Mesa does not sell numbers or minutes. The carrier account is in your name, forwarding can be undone in minutes, and porting away is a form rather than a negotiation.
You leave with everything
Transcripts, recordings, bookings and the workflow definitions. There is no export request queue, because none of it was ever held hostage.
Before you sign
Ask us anything this page does not answer.
Every figure this site cites has a live source behind it, and the way we will report our own numbers is published before the numbers exist. If something here decides the deal, ask on the demo and you get the date rather than an adjective.