Sometime in March 2025, thousands of Irish pub owners got a phone call asking the same question: how much is a pint of Guinness? The caller was an AI voice agent, working through a list of over 4,500 pubs across all 32 counties of Ireland.
The project is called Guinndex, built by developer Matt Cortland. The agent, powered by ElevenLabs voice AI, made the calls and collected verbal price quotes. Claude AI then processed the call transcripts to extract the pricing data, cross-referenced against 24 years of Irish government statistics from the Central Statistics Office.
The results map a sharp price divide. The national average sits at about €5.80 per pint. Dublin pubs charge around €6.75. Head to Leitrim, Longford, or Roscommon, and prices drop as low as €4.50. The dataset now stays current through a WhatsApp service that collects crowdsourced price reports from users, supplemented by periodic re-surveys.
Beyond the pub trivia, this project shows what AI voice agents can actually do today. Surveying 4,500 businesses, collecting verbal responses, and turning those into structured, queryable data - that was a multi-week job for a small team before. Cortland ran it autonomously. The full dataset is browsable at guinndex.ai.