Square now builds AI voice ordering into its own platform. We are obviously not neutral, so this comparison uses Square's own published documentation rather than our characterisation of it — including the part where Square is the better choice.
If you run your restaurant on Square, you have probably seen that Square added AI voice ordering to answer your phone. It is bundled into a Square subscription, which makes it the obvious first thing to try, and for some restaurants it is genuinely the right answer.
It also has specific limits that Square documents openly. Those limits matter a lot for some restaurants and not at all for others. Everything below is quoted from Square's own help article, checked on 27 July 2026.
| Square AI voice ordering | Pulse AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone number | "works only with your Square-provided business numbers" (call forwarding suggested as a workaround) | Keeps the number customers already call |
| Payment | "All orders must be paid before processing the order" — customer gets a text link to pay online | Pay at pickup, cash included |
| Non-order questions | "not trained to answer other types of questions such as business hours, location information, reservations, or specialized orders such as catering" | Answers hours, location, reservations and catering |
| After hours | Takes the call and schedules pickup for the next available slot | Same — plus scheduled orders |
| Setup | "about 5 business days" | Typically live in about a day |
| POS support | Square only | Square, Clover and GoTab |
| Cost | Included with Square Plus, Premium or Messages Plus | Separate paid service |
Square requires prepayment. In their words, "All orders must be paid before processing the order. Your customers will receive a text message with a link to an online cart to complete checkout and pay online."
If your customers are used to calling, ordering, and paying when they collect, that is a real change to how your business works — and it is a change imposed on the customer, mid-call, by text message. Some will do it. Some will hang up. The ones who were going to pay cash at the counter are simply not served.
Every phone order Square's product takes is a prepaid online order that happened to start on the phone. If pay-at-pickup is how your customers behave, that is the whole question.
Square's feature "works only with your Square-provided business numbers." Their suggested workaround is call forwarding.
For a restaurant whose number is printed on menus, painted on a window, sitting in a thousand phone contacts and indexed by Google, the number is an asset. Pulse is built the other way round: your existing number stays the front door.
Square is direct that its assistant "is not trained to answer other types of questions such as business hours, location information, reservations, or specialized orders such as catering."
That is a fair description of a focused product. It also describes a large share of what actually rings a restaurant phone. "Are you open on Sunday", "do you have parking", "can you do 40 people on Saturday" — those calls still land on a human, or they do not get answered.
We would rather say this plainly than have you find out after signing up.
If you already pay for Square Plus, Premium or Messages Plus, your customers already order and pay online, and what you want is the phone to capture straightforward orders into Square, then Square's built-in feature is the sensible starting point. It costs no extra vendor fee, it is already inside the system you use, and there is no second company to manage. Start there.
Pulse makes sense when one of the limits above is a problem you actually have: you need to keep your number, you take cash at pickup, your phone is full of questions that are not orders, or you are not on Square at all.
Whichever you pick, the failure that costs you money is not the call that breaks loudly. It is the call that sounds perfect while the wrong thing reaches the kitchen. Worth asking any vendor, us included, how the total gets calculated and whether anything checks it afterwards. We wrote up how Pulse verifies order accuracy in detail.
You can also just call ours and try to break it: (313) 889-7436.