Key takeaways
- Yelp's Check for Me feature sends an AI voice agent to call restaurants and check wait times on behalf of users.
- The AI assistant now integrates with OpenTable for direct booking and retains user preferences across conversations.
- Yelp launched Smart Lead Reply at $30 per month, letting business owners automate customer inquiries and qualify leads.
Yelp has launched a voice-powered AI agent that calls restaurants on behalf of users to check wait times. Named Check for Me, the capability appears on restaurant pages in Yelp’s app. Users input their party size and phone number, prompting an AI agent to call the restaurant and ask about current wait times. The agent then texts back the results, letting users decide whether to visit that restaurant.
Part of a Broader Wave of AI Phone Assistants
Consumer-Facing Calling Emerges as a Category
Check for Me arrives amid growing momentum around AI agents that place outbound calls on behalf of consumers. Platforms like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have recently rolled out calling features that let users delegate phone calls for customer service problems and appointment bookings to automated systems. Yelp itself has been building the underlying infrastructure for this category for over a year. The company debuted a voice solution last year specifically designed for restaurants and service providers, equipping those businesses with AI calling capabilities. Check for Me mirrors that offering from the consumer side. Instead of businesses using AI to handle incoming calls, consumers now use AI to initiate calls to businesses.
A Potential Friction Point: AI Talking to AI
The approach introduces one scenario that could cause problems. If a restaurant has adopted Yelp’s voice solution or a competing AI calling platform, the consumer’s AI agent will reach another AI system rather than a human employee. Agent-to-agent conversations are a known source of friction. These interactions can fail to exchange information accurately, break down mid-call, or return incomplete or garbled data. In practice, a user might send their AI assistant to call a restaurant to check wait times, only to have the restaurant’s AI fail to extract or communicate the correct information back.
Yelp’s AI Assistant Gets Major Upgrades
Direct Booking and Persistent Memory
Beyond the calling feature, Yelp has refreshed its embedded AI assistant, the chatbot that helps users find and book restaurants and services. The most visible enhancement is a new partnership with OpenTable that enables users to book tables directly inside Yelp without switching to OpenTable’s separate app. The assistant is also becoming more context-aware. It now saves information about user preferences that come up in earlier conversations and applies that knowledge in future interactions. Users can review their chat history from the past 30 days within the app, with the option to access their complete conversation history coming later.
Custom Reminders and Recurring Recommendations
The assistant supports a new reminders feature. Users can set up recurring suggestions on a schedule they define, such as receiving weekend dining recommendations every Friday or periodic suggestions for activities in their area. This gives users control over both the frequency and type of recommendations flowing through the assistant.
New Lists and Curation Tools
Yelp is introducing a custom lists system that lets users organize and save places. Two template categories launch initially: “Been Here” for places users have already visited, and “Want to Go” for places they want to try. These lists can be filtered by location, category such as restaurants or bars, and cuisine type. Users can reorder items within a list, add notes to specific entries, and share entire lists with friends and family members.
Yelp plans to roll out weekly recommendations next month based on each user’s saved items and their personal rankings of those places. Later this year, the company will convert its existing collections feature into the new lists format and redesign the lists tab interface, adding a maps view so users can see the geographic distribution of their saved places.
Business Owners Get an AI Customer Support Tool
Yelp is also targeting small business owners with a new AI product called Smart Lead Reply, priced at $30 per month. The tool automatically responds to incoming customer inquiries and engages customers in follow-up conversations to qualify leads, determining whether they are a good fit for the business. Business owners can customize how the agent should behave in these conversations, setting parameters for tone, the types of questions to ask, and the criteria for marking someone as a qualified lead. This reflects a wider industry shift, as platforms like Meta have begun selling AI-powered customer support tools to small businesses as a way to help them automate routine customer inquiries and accelerate response times.
Source: TechCrunch
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Yelp's Check for Me feature work?
Users enter their party size and phone number on a restaurant page in the Yelp app. An AI agent then calls the restaurant to check current wait times and texts the results back to help the user decide whether to visit.
What is Smart Lead Reply and who is it for?
Smart Lead Reply is a $30-per-month AI tool for business owners. It automatically responds to incoming customer inquiries and attempts to qualify leads by engaging customers in conversation, with owners able to customize how the agent should behave.
What other AI features did Yelp add to its assistant?
The assistant now integrates with OpenTable for direct booking, remembers user preferences from past conversations, supports custom reminders for recurring suggestions, and will show weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items. Users can access chat history from the past 30 days in the app.
