The archive · AI & Models · Product decision · 2025
ZEALS' omotenashi bet: a voice AI that sells, #1 on Product Hunt, then into robots
Japan's ZEALS launched Omakase.ai Voice in the US, hit #1 on Product Hunt in April 2025, and is pushing its reception AI into physical robots.
ZEALS (Omakase.ai)
What the business is
Omakase.ai Voice is a voice AI sales and reception agent platform from ZEALS: a business pastes in its website URL and gets a multilingual AI agent that converses with customers by voice, recommends products live, adapts its tone to the brand, and runs around the clock.
How it started
Masahiro Shimizu founded ZEALS in 2014 while at university and built the company on chat commerce, an early bet that conversations with customers could be a sales channel. A decade later the same conviction took voice form: Omakase.ai Voice, an AI agent that greets, recommends and sells over speech, presented to the global market through an America-first launch.
What happened
The product reads a company's site and generates a fully multimodal voice agent — it talks while showing product pages and moving between tabs, with configurable tone and real-time analysis of customer questions and conversions. Released in the US on 2025-04-18 with a free beta, it finished #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt that day, which ZEALS said beat Google Gemini 2.5 Flash and other launches; the company then planned Japanese and other language versions.
How it ended up
On 2025-11-18 ZEALS announced Omakase Robotics, integrating the Omakase.ai voice agent into robots so the same reception AI works in physical stores, and reported that more than 15,000 AI agents had been generated worldwide — the product moving from website widget to offline hospitality.
Background
Omakase.ai Voice is a voice AI reception and sales agent from ZEALS, a Tokyo company founded in 2014 by Masahiro Shimizu that started with chat commerce. A business pastes in its website URL and the platform generates an AI agent that talks with visitors by voice, recommends products live and adapts its tone to the brand.
The bet behind it: text chatbots answer questions but do not sell, while a voice agent that can converse, show products and browse pages at once reproduces a good in-store clerk. ZEALS made 'omotenashi' — Japanese hospitality — an engineering problem rather than a slogan.
The launch was deliberately America-first. Omakase.ai Voice went live in the US on 2025-04-18 and took #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt the same day with 290 upvotes, which ZEALS said placed it ahead of Google Gemini 2.5 Flash; Japanese and other languages were planned next.
The product kept moving from screen to world: on 2025-11-18 ZEALS announced Omakase Robotics, embedding the voice agent in robots for offline stores, and said over 15,000 AI agents had been generated worldwide.
What has to be true
- ZEALS bet the wedge was setup friction: paste a URL, get an AI agent in seconds, so adoption needed no integration project or developer.
- The America-first launch put the product in front of the global builder community that Product Hunt reaches, and the #1 day proved demand outside Japan.
- Voice plus simultaneous visual browsing was a genuine product difference from text chatbots, which answer but cannot carry a sale.
- Extending the same agent into robots let ZEALS reuse its software across online and offline hospitality instead of building a separate business.
What can be applied
Hospitality can be a product moat: ZEALS engineered omotenashi into a voice UX, launched where the world judges first, and proved an agent must sell, not just answer.
Aftermath
As of late 2025, ZEALS is scaling Omakase.ai beyond the website: Omakase Robotics, announced on 2025-11-18, embeds the voice agent into robots for physical stores, with development led by former Credify CTO Shuichi Nagao. The company reports more than 15,000 AI agents generated worldwide since the US launch and says the roadmap is multilingual rollout and deeper retail deployments. Risks include big-model vendors shipping similar voice agents and the gap between Product Hunt acclaim and sustained enterprise sales.
Sources
- ジールス、音声接客AIエージェント「Omakase.ai Voice」を米国で正式リリース
- 音声AIエージェントのZEALS オフライン接客まで行う新事業開始
- 日本発で Product Hunt デイリートップ3入りしたプロダクト完全リスト
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