Yelp Launches AI Tools to Answer Calls and Take Reservations

Yelp is adding some new AI-powered tools called Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist, designed to help understaffed restaurants and local businesses manage a lot of customers with more ease. The new AI agents can do a wide range of tasks, including answering calls, taking reservations, modifying bookings, and answering common questions like menu options. Yelp Host can also text customers follow-up links to menus, waitlists, or pickup and delivery orders. All of this is a part of Yelp‘s larger AI expansion, which aims to provide 24/7 customer management for small businesses.

Image:Yelp

Yelp Host starts at $149 a month, or $99 a month for Guest Manager, and will soon be able to add diners to waitlists automatically. Yelp Receptionist is launching this week for certain businesses, and coming to more businesses later, starting at $99 a month, will be able to handle incoming calls, collect lead information, and schedule appointments. Both of these AI tools are pre-trained on Yelp’s business data and can work right out of the box to do things like answer calls 24/7 or only help when it is needed.

This launch comes right alongside other Yelp AI updates, including Yelp’s AI chatbot assistant, a camera-based menu scanner, and a voice search tool that understands natural speech. This strategy is a larger industry trend with companies like DoorDash and Google developing similar AI systems to automate communication. The idea of AI tools starting to communicate and respond to each other could mean that the future of customer service could become a lot more automated.

Do you own a small business, and are you thinking about using Yelp’s new AI tools? If you called a restaurant and heard an AI on the other end, would you talk to it or hang up? Let us know in the comments!

Source: The Verge Images: Yelp