Yelp's AI-Powered Updates: A Revolution in User Experience

Yelp's AI-Powered Updates:

Yelp is launching a wide range of AI-powered updates aimed at enhancing user experience. These innovations include an improved smart assistant capable of providing accurate answers about restaurants, bars, local tourist destinations, and retail stores. This assistant goes beyond mere textual responses, as it can scan paper menus to provide detailed information about dishes. Furthermore, Yelp is enhancing its search functionalities by supporting natural language queries and voice search, and highlighting the most popular offerings on various business pages, such as auto repair shops, hair salons, clothing stores, and public parks.

Knowledge Graphs:

These fundamental enhancements rely on the use of Knowledge Graphs, which are structured data frameworks that connect different entities (such as businesses, products, services, and even concepts like 'vegetarian dishes') and the complex relationships between them. These knowledge graphs provide AI systems with the necessary context, enabling them to understand natural language queries more deeply, distinguish multiple meanings of words, and provide more accurate and relevant answers and recommendations to users, representing a core pillar in enhancing Yelp's search capabilities and smart services.

Smart Assistant Expansion:

Yelp had launched an AI-powered assistant last year to facilitate user communication with suitable services by describing their needs. Today, Yelp is expanding the scope of this advanced technology to answer inquiries about other business categories, including restaurants, bars, tourist attractions, and retail traders. This assistant relies on a precise analysis of available information from business pages, their websites, reviews, and photos, to provide comprehensive and useful answers. For example, users can inquire about the types of animals they can see in a particular zoo.

Google Knowledge Panel: This image displays structured information about Thomas Jefferson, illustrating how knowledge graphs present organized information directly in search results.

"Google Knowledge Panel" — Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Facilitating Search and Personalizing the Experience

Pre-set Common Questions:

To facilitate the search process, Yelp displays pre-set common questions on business pages, saving users the effort of manually formulating their inquiries. The company also announced that the dedicated services assistant will now remember user preferences to provide more personalized recommendations for their future projects.

Conversational and Voice Queries:

Yelp continues its efforts to improve the search experience, allowing users to enter natural language queries directly into the search bar. These conversational queries will also be supported via the app's voice search feature, enhancing the ease and effectiveness of information access.

Popular Dishes and Services:

Yelp has always focused on highlighting popular dishes and drinks within restaurant and bar pages. Now, the platform will also display the most popular desserts at various food outlets. More importantly, Yelp is expanding this feature to include over 100 diverse business categories. Users will be able to discover the most prominent services offered by any store in its "Most Mentioned" section, such as popular haircuts or color treatments at beauty salons.

Innovations in Menu Exploration and Advanced Search

AI Menu Scanning:

Yelp introduces an additional AI-powered feature specifically designed to help diners effectively explore menu items. By employing AI-powered image recognition, users can scan a paper menu with their smartphone camera. Interactive bubbles will then appear overlaid on the screen above different dishes. By tapping on any bubble, users can view photos of the dish and read reviews and experiences from other diners about it.

Enhanced Search Interaction:

Thanks to these innovative features, Yelp enhances search appeal and interactivity, making it more conversational and convenient for users. These steps come in response to the growing popularity of chat-based search tools, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, with leading companies like Google also integrating similar features into their search and maps services to assist in discovering new places and experiences.

Knowledge Graph Challenges: This image depicts a key challenge in building knowledge graphs, "entity alignment." The image illustrates two hypothetical knowledge graphs, one representing California state politics and the other 1980s action movies. The green shaded area shows successful alignment of two entities representing the same person (Arnold Schwarzenegger) despite differing information in each node, highlighting the complexity in linking identical entities across different knowledge graphs.

"Knowledge graph entity alignment" — Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

AI Agents and Future Features

Yelp's AI Voice Agents:

Earlier this year, Yelp unveiled a preview of AI-powered voice agents specifically designed for restaurants and service businesses. With the launch of this latest update, these advanced tools are now available to businesses. Yelp's AI-powered host can effectively manage reservations, answer customer inquiries, handle special requests, and even modify bookings for restaurants. The AI-powered receptionist for service businesses can gather project details, assist in qualifying leads, and send call summaries directly to the business's Yelp inbox. It is worth noting that other companies like Square and Kea also offer innovative AI-powered voice solutions for restaurants and order management.

New Fall Features:

Coinciding with the new fall release, Yelp is also introducing a set of additional features that enhance the user experience. These include: AI-generated videos that combine user photos and provide rich information about restaurants and bars; the ability to upload extended videos (ranging from 10 to 30 seconds); a new and engaging visual summary for restaurants and bars based on photos and videos; compiled "before and after" photos for service businesses; and finally, a new and innovative section dedicated to planning future projects.