When a Lebanese restaurant gets a flood of WhatsApp messages on a Saturday night, most of those threads still wait for a human to reply. Hala AI wants that to stop being the bottleneck. The Lebanese-built conversational agent runs on WhatsApp, websites and voice calls, and it replies in real time in English, Arabic and Arabic dialects, including Lebanese.
According to its founders, Hala AI is the first AI conversational agent built in Lebanon that can hold thousands of WhatsApp conversations at once. It handles bookings, qualifies leads, manages orders and answers customer support questions, all without a human on the other end.
Inside the studio behind Hala
Hala AI is built by Meta Empires and was co-founded by Daniel Madi and Ali Assi. The product sits inside a wider team that includes a sales lead, a tech lead, a frontend engineer and a set of contributor roles. The pitch is straightforward: take the routine call and chat work that ties up small teams in Lebanon and the Gulf, and let an AI agent close the loop.
What the agent actually does
Hala covers four core jobs: booking, lead qualification, order management and customer support. It can talk to a customer on WhatsApp, then continue the same conversation on the company's website without losing context. It can also handle voice calls, both inbound and outbound, on a 24/7 schedule.
The language layer is the part that matters most for the local market. Hala understands more than 20 languages and replies in native Arabic, English and specific Arabic dialects such as Lebanese and Saudi. For a Beirut hotel or a Riyadh salon, that means a customer can text in dialect and get a reply that does not sound foreign.
Industries already plugging it in
Hala has been built around the verticals that live and die on inbound calls and DMs. The use case list on tryhala.ai covers real estate, restaurants, retail, beauty salons, hotels, medical centers and car dealerships. The patterns are similar across them: qualify the lead, book the slot, confirm the order, reduce no-shows and follow up before the buyer goes cold.
On its own page, the company reports a 44% lift in property viewings booked for real estate clients, 36% more appointments for beauty salons and a 40% reduction in no-shows for medical centers. The agent connects to calendars, CRMs and databases so the data ends up where the operations team already works.
Pricing built around team size
Hala AI is sold in three tiers. Starter, at $299 per month, runs one inbound agent across WhatsApp and the website for small businesses getting started with AI. Pro, at $599 per month, adds a second agent, multi-function capabilities, dialect replies, a data analytics dashboard and priority support. Enterprise, at $1,699 per month, is built for franchises and multi-location operators and includes unlimited agents, custom integrations and a dedicated account manager.
Each plan also gives the customer a WhatsApp manager dashboard, the ability to turn the AI on or off, intervene in a live conversation, and request custom knowledge base updates that are applied within 24 hours.
Where Hala goes next
Meta Empires is positioning Hala as a horizontal layer rather than a single-vertical product. The same agent that books a hotel room can qualify a real estate buyer, and the same dialect engine that serves a Lebanese restaurant can serve a Saudi clinic. The product is already live, with a demo line running on WhatsApp, and the team is taking inbound business through tryhala.ai.
See the agent in action at Hala AI.
