Yelp is expanding the role of AI in its app, from checking restaurant wait times to helping people organize places they want to visit. The company is also introducing a paid tool for businesses to respond to customer inquiries and qualify potential leads.
Let Yelp check the wait
The new feature, Check for Me, appears on restaurant pages in the app. Users enter their party size and phone number, and an AI voice agent calls the restaurant to ask about wait times. Yelp then texts the result so the user can decide whether to go.
The feature puts an automated caller between the customer and the restaurant. Yelp introduced a voice solution for restaurants and service providers last year, so a call could involve an AI agent on each side. The source notes that communication between those agents could break down, leaving a practical question about how smoothly the exchange will work.
A more personalized discovery assistant
Yelp is also updating the assistant people use to find restaurants and services. An OpenTable integration will let users book a restaurant without leaving the Yelp app, connecting discovery with a next step in planning.
The assistant will be able to remember preferences mentioned in earlier chats. Users can also access chat history from the past 30 days, with the full history expected to become available soon. These changes are meant to make recommendations and follow-up interactions easier to pick up where they left off.
Users will be able to ask the chatbot to create custom reminders. One example is a request to receive suggestions for weekend activities every Friday, turning the assistant into a recurring prompt for ideas rather than a tool used only for a single search.
Lists for places to revisit or try
Yelp is adding user-created lists, beginning with “Been Here” and “Want to Go.” People can filter their lists by location, category and cuisine, reorder entries, add notes and share lists with others.
The company also plans to show weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings starting next month. Later in the year, Yelp expects to convert collections to lists and give the lists tab a new look, alongside a maps view. Together, these features give saved places a bigger role in how users discover and plan visits.
Businesses get a paid reply tool
For business owners, Yelp is releasing Smart Lead Reply, a paid product that can answer customers and engage with them to qualify a lead. Businesses can specify how the agent should handle a conversation. The service will cost $30 per month.
The tool extends Yelp’s AI plans beyond consumer discovery and into business communications. The source notes that other companies, including Meta, are also pursuing AI offerings for small businesses handling inbound customer inquiries.
Across the updates, Yelp is applying AI to several stages of local search: asking a restaurant about its wait, finding and saving places, and responding to people who contact a business. The usefulness of those features will depend on whether the automated exchanges provide clear, dependable help to both customers and businesses.