The repeat questions get answered without you. OttoMail runs on what you already have — your Gmail and one Google Doc you control — so there’s no one to hire and no new system to run.
We do take walk-ins on Fridays — the bar and terrace are first-come, first-served.1 Last seating is 8:30pm.2 Hope to see you!
You marked this type human-only. It always gets a person, with a draft already waiting.
The owner answers the parking question between deliveries. The GM stops a line check to confirm what time the kitchen closes. Field studies of interrupted work put the recovery at about 25 minutes per interruption, and the questions come all day. You’re paying management wages for work that needs none of their judgment. The fixes you’ve already priced are heavy: ignore it, hire for it, or wedge a support-desk ticketing system into a restaurant.
An hour a day writing replies, plus two more lost to refocus, out of the five hours that a dozen interruptions break at the measured 25-minute recovery. Three hours a day at a manager’s full employer cost, about $48 an hour with benefits, comes to $37,000 a year.
Everyone asks whether AI will drift. Human distraction is drift too: task-switching can eat up to 40% of productive time, and a manager answering the corkage question mid-rush shortens, improvises, misremembers. Your doc doesn’t. The answer holds at 6pm on a Friday.
Hire it away instead: the median U.S. administrative assistant earns $47,540 — about $68,000 once benefits are added, which government data puts at 30% of total compensation. A real salary, spent retyping the same twelve answers.
Your team doesn’t learn ticket numbers or macros. Connect one inbox or five — info@, bookings@, events@ — and the day-to-day is still one simple screen: a review queue across every inbox, cleared with your coffee. Replies go out from each address as itself, and the answers live in a doc you already know how to edit.
That playbook is one Google Doc you own and edit, and every claim in every reply carries a citation back to the line it came from. Change the doc and every future answer changes with it. Otto can’t wander from what you wrote, because your playbook is the only place it’s allowed to answer from.
“Yes — dogs are welcome on the terrace.1 We just ask that they stay leashed.2”
A drafted reply will still always need you — your time, your attention, your hand on the Send button. Most tools stop at the draft: it sits in your inbox, and you open it, check it, and send it, on every email, in every inbox you run. That saves the typing, which was always the smaller line on the bill. Otto is built to finish the job: once a category of question has earned your trust, those replies send themselves.
Otto sends nothing on its own while it learns, and every approval builds a track record you can see. A category graduates at 50 approvals with 98% sent as written, and only when you flip the switch. The first category usually starts answering on its own early, and the rest follow as they earn it.
Every question Otto can’t answer yet gets logged in your customer’s own words, ranked by how often it costs you a reply. Answer it once in the doc and it’s answered for good. The share of mail handling itself climbs week over week.
Set up with you on a call, usually about an hour. The apprenticeship starts the same day.