Yelp's AI Assistant Now Books Reservations, Orders Food, and Schedules Appointments in One Chat

Yelp's updated AI assistant can answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversation | TechCrunch

For years, existing consumer platforms have tried to keep users within their app by offering more services. After the rise of the AI chatbot, the trend is to have people use the assistant for both queries and actions without leaving the conversational flow. With its latest update, Yelp is letting people ask questions, get restaurant reservations, order food delivery, and book service professionals, all through its updated AI assistant. The company debuted the AI assistant in 2024 to help people search for different services based on their problem. It is now using the platform data paired with an AI assistant to let users do more tasks. In a demo seen by TechCrunch, the company's SVP of product, Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, searched for hiking places to go with a dog without a leash; looked for takeout places along the way, with an option to place an order on Doordash; looked for restaurant recommendations for a weekend plan, with an option to check out availability and book a table; and queried about painting a friends' new Victorian house without leaving the chat. "We would really like consumers to reconceive Yelp as a place where they can ask questions and get answers, not just that, but also complete the action. That's Yelp reconceiving from a review platform to an answers and action platform," he told TechCrunch over a call. "Some of the investments we're making will be in that lane." Users can select a specific page for a restaurant or service when they tap on it, or ask more questions about the business. Yelp said that as the knowledge is grounded in details of the business on the platform, the business's website, and user reviews, there is a scant chance of getting wrong answers. The company is hosting the assistant in a new tab in the app, which is now placed in the center of the bottom navigation bar, so users are likely to visit it more often. The assistant will be available on iOS and Android at launch and will work with eligible business pages, including restaurants, retail shops, and attractions. The company said that the desktop version and rollout across all kinds of businesses are slated for later in the year. Apart from fetching information, Yelp also announced integration with external providers to complete an action, like place an order or appointment. Users can now order food through DoorDash and Grubhub, book fitness or beauty appointments through Vagaro, a doctor's appointment through ZocDoc, and a car repair through Repairpal. Plus, it also offers a Calendly integration for other kinds of businesses that allow appointment booking. Notably, all these actions will lead you to a specific provider's app or page, meaning this is not "agentic" in nature, where the entire transaction is completed within the chat window. Kuduvalli mentioned that while the redirections are the way Yelp is set up now, it might not "remain that way" in the future. However, it's hard to say how agentic pipelines might work with other services for cases when the user doesn't specify whether they want to order food through DoorDash or Grubhub. Besides the new AI assistant, Yelp is rolling out a few quality-of-life updates to the app. Last year, it launched the ability for people to scan a menu and see what dishes look like through photos other users posted. Now, users can look at those dishes within the app as they are scanning a menu. What's more, Yelp said that users will be able to search the media gallery of a business using natural language queries instead of keywords. Plus, the company will offer an AI-powered tagging and grouping feature for before and after photos to business owners to avoid manual work.

Yelp's New AI-Powered Assistant Will Book a Reservation for You

Macy has been working for CNET for coming on 2 years. Prior to CNET, Macy received a North Carolina College Media Association award in sports writing. Don't want to read all those restaurant reviews or book a reservation yourself? Yelp is launching a new AI-powered assistant that you can use to ask questions and schedule services in one conversation. The new AI assistant works across every category on Yelp and is available on both iOS and Android. Yelp is the latest platform to bring agentic artificial intelligence -- AI models that can perform tasks on your behalf based on a conversational command -- into real-life services. Google has been giving Gemini more and more ability to take steps like calling businesses or booking trips for you, while integrating the chatbot deeper into systems like its Chrome browser. OpenAI's ChatGPT can do things like customize a Starbucks order or plan a Little Caesars pizza party. Then there are more advanced AI agents, like OpenClaw, which can take control of much of your digital life. "The new Yelp Assistant is our most significant AI product evolution yet as we reconceive Yelp around instant answers and seamless actions," Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp, said in a statement. "And for the first time, consumers can seamlessly move from discovery to action in a single conversation with new and enhanced integrations -- from booking a table, to ordering delivery or scheduling an appointment." Read also: Alexa Plus AI Can Order Food From Uber Eats and Grubhub, but Only With the Right Device You can now access Yelp Assistant at the center of the app through the new "Assistant" tab. The assistant uses the millions of evaluations, first-hand experiences, images and business details posted by Yelp users to execute complex tasks on your behalf. Using the in-app AI assistant, you can reserve a table at any restaurant that uses Yelp Guest Manager for table booking, order takeout through DoorDash and Grubhub, request a quote for a service and book an appointment. You can reach out to professionals across hundreds of categories, such as auto, beauty, pet and event services, and book through integrations with platforms like Vagaro, Calendly and Zocdoc. The company originally debuted its AI assistant in 2024, but these new features are an expansion to allow Yelp users to do more with the in-app chatbot.

Yelp is making its AI chatbot way more useful

Yelp is giving its chatbot assistant a major upgrade, turning the platform into something closer to a digital concierge with a suite of new features designed for "getting things done." The move, one of several AI-focused updates in recent months, is part of a broader industry push to make AI more relevant and practically useful to consumers while turning huge troves of user-generated data into a competitive edge. In a press release, Yelp says the Yelp Assistant chatbot will be at "the center of the app experience," where it can answer questions, make recommendations, and even handle bookings in a single conversation. The bot will be available through a new "Assistant" tab spanning every category on Yelp, a significant expansion from its 2024 debut as a tool for hiring service professionals. Yelp is also broadening Assistant's reach with a set of app integrations that let users order takeout or delivery through DoorDash, Grubhub, and other delivery services, request quotes from professionals in the area like auto and pet care, and book appointments with beauty, wellness, fitness, and healthcare providers through Vagaro and Zocdoc. Support for Yelp Waitlist is "coming soon," as is Calendly integration for scheduling appointments. Craig Saldanha, Yelp's chief product officer, described the update as the company's "most significant AI product evolution yet," adding that it is "only the beginning of a more conversational, personalized and action-oriented Yelp experience."

Yelp's AI Assistant Now Helps Reserve Tables, Book Appointments, Order Food

The idea is to show answers based on real-world experience, Yelp says. 'There's a massive gap between how quickly people are adopting AI search and how much they actually trust it.' Yelp today announced more than 35 updates to its mobile app as part of a spring product release, including a more capable AI assistant that can now help initiate bookings and reservations. The Yelp Assistant, launched in 2024, previously focused on answering questions about service providers and businesses. With today's update, it now supports reservations, appointment bookings, quote requests, and takeout and delivery orders from the same chat interface. Accessing the AI assistant is also easier; look for the dedicated tab on the homepage. You can provide the AI with as complex or specific prompts as you like, and it will scour relevant Yelp user reviews and ratings to deliver a precise yet personal response. The idea is to show answers based on real-world experience, Yelp says. "There's a massive gap between how quickly people are adopting AI search and how much they actually trust it -- research shows that few consumers greatly trust the results, and most want to see real reviews from real people, not just an AI-generated summary. Yelp Assistant was built to address this trust gap," says Craig Saldanha, Yelp's chief product officer. You can ask Yelp Assistant to find a highly rated dentist, birthday spots with vegan options, and heated outdoor seating, or just to provide suggestions for an afternoon with your friends in a new city. When the assistant responds, you can ask follow-up questions or book an appointment or a table using the relevant links in the same chat interface. The feature works for table booking at restaurants that use Yelp Guest Master, takeout and delivery orders on DoorDash and GrubHub, beauty and fitness appointments through Vagaro on iOS, healthcare appointments through Zocdoc on iOS, and auto-repair requests through RepairPal. You can also use the feature to request a quote for professionals in more than 450 categories, including home, auto, beauty, pet, and event services. Yelp is also updating its Menu Vision feature. Now, when you hover your phone camera over a physical menu and point toward a particular dish, the feature will fetch user-uploaded photos and reviews of the dish. These features start rolling out on Android and iOS today, with desktop rollout expected later this year. Check out Yelp's blog post for an overview of all the other improvements it has made.

Yelp introduces an AI chatbot to help users sift local recommendations

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Online review aggregator Yelp wants to harness artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find information curated by other people. Although Yelp's users have always been able to dive into its reservoir of 330 million local business reviews, they sometimes find themselves drowning in a sea of commentary from other people about restaurants, doctors, plumbers, roofers and a smorgasbord of other merchants -- a problem the new chatbot assistant is designed to solve. For instance, if a user asks Yelp's new assistant for a good place to get coffee with a dog, the app will show recommendations alongside relevant reviews. "This chatbot can really understand 500 reviews in a second whereas a consumer might say, 'Well, I read the first five reviews, so I guess that's good enough,'" said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, who co-founded the company 22 years ago. Analyzing and explaining vast amounts of information in an easily digestible summary is something that other leading chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's answer engine and Google's AI overviews already have been doing. Yelp believes its chatbot will stand out by pointing to the reviews that led to its recommendations and conclusions. The San Francisco-based company decided to create an AI chatbot that shows the evidence underlying its findings, after a survey found that most consumers worry the technology provides misinformation or fabrications. "People want AI chatbots to be transparent about where they are getting the data from, they want to see the reviews alongside the results when they're doing local search," said Craig Saldanha, Yelp's chief product officer. "So we are trying to make sure the human connections stay front and center while AI handles all the drudgery of making those connections." Yelp has been looking for a spark during an AI boom that has more than doubled the value of the tech-driven Nasdaq composite index while its stock price is stuck at roughly the same level as the end of 2022, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT. Although Yelp business reviews have always been popular among consumers looking for recommendations about places to eat and shop, the company hasn't been able to overcome people's almost reflexive habit of turning to Google when they're searching for almost anything. Google was already synonymous with search by the time Stoppelman and Russel Simmons launched Yelp in 2004, but its results about local businesses often were either inadequate or inaccurate. To help fill the void, Google signed a two-year licensing agreement to gain access to Yelp's reviews. But the partnership fell apart when Google began to summarize various information about various topics -- including restaurant recommendations in a particular neighborhood -- in a way that gave consumers less reason to click on links that sent them to other sites. That phenomenon has hurt Yelp and other free online services that make most of their money from advertising; Yelp depends on Google for more than 70% of its web traffic in the U.S. The tensions came to head when Yelp accused Google of improperly raiding its business reviews and favoring its own services. Those allegations helped trigger a investigation by the Federal Trade Commission that ended with a 2013 settlement that only required Google to make a few relatively minor changes. But the complaints about Google's tactics didn't stop, triggering a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that culminated in a 2024 decision condemning the search engine as an illegal monopoly. But a federal judge last year rebuffed the government's request to break up Google, and instead ordered less drastic changes -- a decision that was shaped by the way more people now rely on chatbots to inform them instead of search engines. Yelp is pursuing its own antitrust lawsuit against Google in a case scheduled for a May 2028 trial. As part of its effort to diversify and increase its annual revenue of $1.5 billon, Yelp already is licensing some of its data to OpenAI for potential usage in ChatGPT while betting that its chatbot's emphasis on connecting people will still reel in more traffic to its service. "With this new technology, we really think you are going to be able to find that needle in a haystack and have a far more personalized experience," Stoppelman said.

Yelp's AI chatbot can now make your dinner reservation

Every business seems to think that its customers want more AI. Yelp is the latest to add more artificial intelligence tools. The review site has upgraded its Yelp Assistant, an agentic AI chatbot, to work across all of Yelp's categories. Yelp Assistant was initially launched in 2024 with a limited scope and then expanded in 2025. With the latest update to its chatbot, Yelp Assistant can handle natural language queries for finding a specific local business. It can also be used to take some additional actions, such as making a restaurant reservation or ordering takeout. Yelp's spring product updates introduced new third-party integrations with Vagaro, ZocDoc and Calendly. Yelp Assistant can also use these integrated services for booking appointments in related fields. The chatbot now has a dedicated Assistant tab in the iOS and Android apps, and it can also be accessed directly from business pages for certain fields, such as restaurants and retail shops. Support for all business types and a desktop version are planned for later in 2026. Other AI features coming to Yelp include a personalized home page on mobile and extra photo discovery tools.

Yelp's AI Assistant Can Now Book Restaurants, Doctors, and More

Yelp is introducing an expanded version of its Yelp Assistant, an agentic chatbot that is able to answer questions, suggest places to visit, and complete tasks like booking a restaurant reservation. Answers rely on hundreds of millions of Yelp reviews sourced from real people, which Yelp says allows the assistant to address "complex and highly specific requests." Yelp Assistant was previously available for hiring service professionals and getting answers to questions about businesses, but now it is available across all Yelp categories. Users are able to ask specific questions when looking for a location, such as "birthday dinner spots with vegan options and heated outdoor seating," or "top-rated gyms with group classes and childcare." With the AI Assistant, users can start out by asking questions to find a suitable location, and then make reservations, book appointments, place delivery orders, or get quotes in the same conversation. Yelp is adding new integrated services including Vagaro, Zocdoc, and Calendly. Yelp is also updating its AI Menu Vision feature with support for photo overlays so users can see what popular dishes, drinks, and desserts look like. The Yelp Assistant is rolling out today and it is accessible through a new Assistant tab in the Yelp app.

New Yelp Assistant tab centralizes search and transactions

Yelp is upgrading its chatbot assistant to a digital concierge model with new features aimed at improving user experience. The upgrade aligns with industry trends to enhance AI relevance for consumers and capitalize on user-generated data. The enhanced Yelp Assistant chatbot will centralize the app experience, addressing inquiries, making recommendations, and managing bookings in one interaction. This initiative promotes the goal for users to "search less and do more" with the AI tool. A new "Assistant" tab will facilitate expanded chatbot functionality, evolving from its initial use as a hiring tool set to launch in 2024. This update marks a significant shift towards making the chatbot a core aspect of the Yelp platform. Yelp plans to broaden the chatbot's capabilities through app integrations, including options to order takeout or delivery from services like DoorDash and Grubhub. Users will also be able to request quotes from local professionals in areas such as auto and pet care. The chatbot will allow users to book appointments with providers in the beauty, wellness, fitness, and healthcare sectors via partnerships with Vagaro and Zocdoc. Support for Yelp Waitlist and Calendly integration for scheduling appointments will be introduced soon. Craig Saldanha, Yelp's chief product officer, stated this update is the company's "most significant AI product evolution yet," indicating a commitment to developing a more conversational and action-oriented experience on the platform.