Yelp adds AI agent that calls restaurants to check wait times

Over the past few weeks, personal assistants such as Instinct, Fo and Muse have let users call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Following that trend, Yelp is adding the ability for its app users to have a voice agent call a restaurant to check wait times.

The new feature, Check for Me, will appear on restaurant pages in the app, where users can enter their party size and phone number. The AI agent then calls on the user's behalf to check wait times and texts the results back so they can decide whether to go to that restaurant.

Last year, Yelp debuted its voice solution for restaurants and service providers. With this new feature, the discovery platform is addressing the consumer side, though a user's agent could end up talking to the restaurant's agent, and agent-to-agent communication might break down the conversation.

The company is also updating its Yelp AI assistant, which helps users discover restaurants and services. With the new OpenTable integration, users can book a restaurant without leaving the app.

Yelp is adding better personalization to its assistant by having it remember preferences users may have mentioned in earlier chats. Users can also access 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 can be filtered by location, category and cuisine, reordered, annotated with notes and shared 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 to lists and giving the lists tab a new look, rolling out later in the year along with a maps view.

Rounding out the changes, Yelp has been thinking about enhancing customer support and business processes through AI. In the new update, the company is releasing a 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 such as Meta have also been courting small businesses with AI offerings to handle inbound customer inquiries.