Over the past few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have allowed users to call businesses for customer support or reservations. In response to this trend, Yelp is adding a feature that allows app users to have a voice agent call a restaurant to check wait times.
The new feature, Check for Me, will appear on the restaurant page within the app, where users can enter the number of people in their party and their phone number. The AI agent then makes a call on your behalf, checks the wait time, and sends you a text message with the results to decide if you want to go to that particular restaurant.
Last year, Yelp debuted a voice solution for restaurants and service providers. This new feature allows the discovery platform to satisfy the consumer side of the equation, but it also means that the user’s agent may be talking to the restaurant’s agent, and communication between agents can interrupt the conversation.
The company is also updating its Yelp AI assistant, which helps users find restaurants and services. The new OpenTable integration makes it easy for users to make restaurant reservations without leaving the app.
Yelp is increasing the personalization of its Assistant by having it remember settings you may have mentioned in previous chats. Additionally, you can access the past 30 days of chat history in the app, and the full history will be available soon.
Users can ask the chatbot to set custom reminders, such as sending weekend activity suggestions every Friday. The company also allows users to create their own lists, starting with “Been Here” and “Want to.”
You can filter and sort the list by location, category, and cuisine, add notes to items, and share them with others.
Next month, the company will start showing weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Yelp is also working on converting collections into listings and giving the listings tab a new look, which will roll out later this year along with map view.
To top off all these changes, Yelp has been looking to enhance its customer support and business processes through AI. With the new update, the company is releasing a new paid product called Smart Lead Reply. This allows you to respond to customers and engage with them to qualify leads. Business owners, who are charged $30 per month for these services, can specify how their agents handle customer conversations. Other companies like Meta also offer AI services to small and medium-sized businesses to respond to customer inquiries.
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