AI agent calls 3,000 pubs in Ireland to learn the price of a pint of Guinness
An engineer and former pub owner built an artificial intelligence (AI) voice agent, Rachel, to call thousands of pubs to ask the price of a pint.
Rachel called over 3,000 pubs across all 32 counties and asked the price of a pint of Guinness, an Irish dry stout, over Paddy’s weekend 2026, Tech.eu reports.
Of those, 2,052 picked up the phone, and over 1,000 pubs gave a price, resulting in the creation of the “Guinndex,” available at guinndex.ai.
The AI agent was developed by Matt Cortland, a London-based American AI engineer and a former pub and bar owner in Ireland.
He created Rachel as a response to the lack of a comprehensive dataset of pint prices in Ireland, as the country’s Central Statistics Office stopped tracking them 14 years ago.
Cortland told Tech.eu that Rachel was trained to be friendly, direct, and tell it was AI if asked. The agent explained that it was “putting together a wee price comparison list.”
Rachel was assigned a Northern Irish accent, inspired by Rachel Duffy from The Traitors, to make her sound more realistic.
The Cybernews community is talking about this. Be a part of the conversation.
Cortland used the voice and agent platform ElevenLabs and the communications platform Twilio to make calls, and Claude AI to extract Guinness pint prices from call recordings. The whole adventure cost him €200 ($231).
Few people realized they were talking to an AI. In one of the pubs, Rachel’s call was answered by the Premier Inn phone system. As two AI systems kept talking past each other, the agent couldn’t get the pint price.
The “Guinndex” is now evolving into a crowdsourced platform, where people can contribute local pint prices across Ireland.
Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.
