In recent weeks, personal assistants such as Instinct, Fo, and Muse have empowered users to contact businesses for customer support and appointment scheduling. Embracing this trend, Yelp is introducing a new capability that allows app users to utilize a voice agent to contact restaurants and check current wait times.
The new feature, titled "Check for Me," will appear on restaurant pages within the app. Users can input their party size and phone number, after which the AI agent calls the restaurant on their behalf to verify wait times and texts the results to the user to assist in their decision-making process.
Yelp debuted its voice solution for restaurants and service providers last year. This latest feature completes the consumer side of the equation for the discovery platform, though there remains a possibility that a user's agent might interact with a restaurant's agent, potentially causing agent-to-agent communication to falter.
The company is also enhancing its Yelp AI assistant, which assists users in discovering restaurants and services. Through a new integration with OpenTable, users can now easily book a restaurant without leaving the application.
Yelp is improving personalization by enabling the assistant to recall preferences mentioned in previous chats. Additionally, users can access chat history from the last 30 days within the app, with full history expected to be available soon.
Users can instruct the chatbot to set custom reminders, such as receiving suggestions for weekend activities every Friday. The company is also allowing users to create their own lists, beginning with "Been Here" and "Want to Go." These lists can be filtered by location, category, and cuisine, reordered, annotated with notes, and shared with others.
Starting next month, the company will begin displaying weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Yelp is also working on converting collections into lists and redesigning the lists tab, with a maps view rolling out later in the year.
To conclude these updates, Yelp has been focusing on enhancing customer support and business processes through AI. The new update includes a paid product called Smart Lead Reply, designed to reply to customers and engage them to qualify leads. Business owners will be charged $30 monthly for these services and can specify how an agent should conduct conversations with customers. Other companies, including Meta, have also been targeting small businesses with AI offerings to manage inbound customer inquiries.
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