In recent weeks, personal assistants such as Instinct, Fo, and Muse have begun allowing users to call businesses for customer support and appointment scheduling. Yelp is now joining this movement by introducing a feature that lets its app users deploy a voice agent to call a restaurant and check wait times. Called Check for Me, the feature will appear on restaurant pages within the app, where users input their party size and phone number. The AI agent then places a call on the user's behalf to inquire about wait times and sends the results via text, helping the user decide whether to visit that restaurant. Yelp first launched its voice solution for restaurants and service providers last year. With this new offering, the discovery platform is now addressing the consumer side of the equation—though there's a chance that a user's agent could end up speaking with the restaurant's agent, and agent-to-agent communication might cause the conversation to break down.

The company is also rolling out updates to its Yelp AI assistant, which helps users find restaurants and services. Through a new OpenTable integration, users can book a restaurant without leaving the app. Yelp is improving personalization by having the assistant remember preferences mentioned in earlier chats. Additionally, users can view their chat history from the past 30 days in the app, with full history coming soon. The chatbot can also be asked to set custom reminders—for example, sending weekend activity suggestions every Friday. Yelp is further enabling users to create their own lists, beginning 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. Starting next month, the company will display weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Yelp is also working on converting collections into lists and giving the lists tab a refreshed design, set to roll out later in the year alongside a maps view.

Rounding out these changes, Yelp has been exploring ways to enhance customer support and business operations through AI. In the new update, the company is launching a paid product called Smart Lead Reply, designed to respond to customers and engage with them to qualify leads. Business owners—who will be charged $30 per month for the service—can specify how an agent should handle conversations with customers. Other companies, including Meta, have likewise been courting small businesses with AI tools to manage inbound customer inquiries.