Over the last few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have enabled users to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Following this trend, Yelp is adding the ability for its app users to get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check wait times.
The new feature, Check for Me, will show up on restaurant pages in the app, where users can enter their party size and phone number. The AI agent then calls on behalf of the user to check wait times and texts them the results to decide if they want to go to that particular restaurant.
Last year, Yelp debuted its voice solution for restaurants and service providers. With this new feature, the discovery platform is fulfilling the consumer side of the equation, though there is a possibility that a user’s agent will talk to the restaurant’s agent, and agent-to-agent communication might break down the conversation.
The company is also updating its Yelp AI assistant that helps users discover restaurants and services. With the new OpenTable integration, users can easily book a restaurant without leaving the app.
Yelp is adding better personalization to its assistant by having it remember preferences that you might have mentioned in previous chats. Plus, you can access your chat history from the past 30 days in the app, with full history available soon.
Users can ask the chatbot to set custom reminders, such as sending suggestions for weekend activities every Friday. The company is also letting users build their own lists, starting with two “Been Here” and “Want to
Go” lists. You can filter your lists by location, category, and cuisine, reorder, add notes to items, and share them with others.
Next month, the company will start showing weekly personalized recommendations based on your saved items and rankings. Yelp is also working on converting collections to lists and giving the lists tab a new look, rolling out later in the year, along with a maps view.
To cap off all these changes, Yelp has been thinking about enhancing customer support and business processes through AI. In the new update, the company is releasing a new paid product called Smart Lead Reply, which can reply to customers and engage with them to qualify a lead. Business owners, who will be charged $30 per month for these services, can specify how an agent should handle a conversation with a customer. Other companies like Meta have also been courting small businesses with AI offerings to handle inbound customer inquiries.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
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