Twenty years in, Yelp is turning to AI to help bring restaurant reviews to life.
The reviews behemoth is testing AI to create short narrated videos describing local businesses by stitching together the photos, videos, and text descriptions that users have already uploaded to the platform.
It’s part of an ongoing push by Yelp to process the hundreds of millions of reviews it’s collected with large language model AI to help users find local businesses that can best serve them.
“We’re such a text-heavy platform that the ability to parse natural language and infer insights from it has been a game changer for us in so many ways,” says Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer.
The new AI capabilities continue Yelp’s ongoing push to further embrace photo and video in an era where restaurant content continues to dominate social media. Last year, the company unveiled a feature to let users upload their own short videos, mirroring what’s become so popular on TikTok and Instagram. Its most recent annual report to shareholders, released Thursday, alluded to competition from “social media platforms and features where consumers are increasingly searching for and posting information about local businesses, such as TikTok and Snap Map.”
In a Yelp demonstration for Fast Company, videos complete with machine-generated voice-overs, captions, and jaunty music outlined the food and atmosphere at an Italian restaurant and suggested some of the best things to order at a Korean steakhouse. Video and still images—which the generated video panned across, Ken Burns style—appeared with attribution to the Yelp users who uploaded them. Yelp believes the videos will encourage users to share more photos and videos while still harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.
There’s no firm timetable for when the AI video feature will reach the general public, but the company is testing various versions of the product to determine exactly which types of videos and AI prompts that create them will make it to Yelp apps.
“We are planning on testing lots of different iterations,” says Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, SVP of Product at Yelp.
Meet the Yelp Assistant
More immediately, Yelp on Tuesday also released an AI update to its tools helping consumers find and hire professionals for projects like home repairs and lawn care. An AI bot called the Yelp Assistant lets users pose natural language queries from wanting to hire movers or a plumber for a particular task to needing help addressing a mysterious leak.
The Assistant then collects additional information through a mix of freeform text and multiple choice questions, in an effort to understand the problem and solicit quotes from appropriate professionals on the platform. While Yelp has for years let users ask for quotes for a particular job, they needed a decent understanding of the scope of work they were requesting, which often isn’t the case.
“With this release, we’re taking the onus upon ourselves,” Kuduvalli Ramesh says. “We’re saying, ‘Look, we will do the diagnosis, why don’t you just come along with us and have a conversation about what’s going on with you.'”
Collecting structured information upfront also makes it easier for busy professionals looking to quote a job, he says. The company earlier this year released other features making it easier for consumers and professionals on the platform to share information, photos, and videos as they discuss potential jobs.
Though the platform is still perhaps most associated with restaurant reviews, more than half of business now comes from services, Saldanha says. To that end, the Yelp app now suggests various sorts of home improvement tasks consumers might be interested in within a dedicated “projects” tab, from kitchen upgrades to preparing a summer firepit. In the near future, AI will let the app offer more customized recommendations, like suggesting hiring painters or cleaning crews after someone hires movers.
Some of Yelp’s AI will also soon be accessible through third-party apps. Partner companies will be able to pass natural language queries looking for restaurants and other businesses to Yelp, which will return appropriate results, through Yelp’s new Fusion AI API. Tools using the pre-AI version of Yelp Fusion to display content from the site include Apple Maps and navigational displays from Audi and Ford, though Yelp declined to comment on if and when particular partners will use the new AI tool.
Yelp isn’t the only platform using AI and automated recommendations to help consumers find contractors (and learn about new types of home services to pay for). Angi last year unveiled GPT-driven tools for finding professionals, and Thumbtack recently released new features to suggest and track maintenance and home improvement tasks.
But Yelp argues its wealth of reviews and investment in consumer-professional matching technology can help users find professionals who will get the job done and help professionals find the best leads on new business. “We were using AI before LLMs to really match consumers based on what they were telling us,” Saldanha says. “And now with LLMs, we’re actually able to refine search intent and make that matching even more accurate.”
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