Building a restaurant telephony AI host with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Nova 2 Sonic
AWS Machine Learning Sergio Barraza
Amazon published a technical guide for building a restaurant AI voice ordering system using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, and Amazon Chime SDK Voice Connector that can answer incoming calls and take orders end-to-end. The system deploys as three layers—a telephony layer handling phone-specific concerns, an agent layer running the conversation logic in isolated microVMs, and a backend layer managing menus and orders through the Model Context Protocol. The solution addresses the problem of restaurants missing approximately 150 phone calls per location monthly, with 60 percent of those being customers attempting to place orders or book tables.
Why it matters
In this post, we show you how to build a voice ordering system that answers a phone number and takes the order from greeting to confirmation. The system uses Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to host and run the agent and Amazon Nova 2 Sonic for real-time speech, connected to a restaurant backend through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The walkthrough covers deploying the full stack with AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and bridging a phone call into the agent through a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) gateway on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate. It also warms the agent session while the phone is still ringing, so the caller never hears dead air.
