Yelp Adds AI-Powered Review Insights for Restaurants

Yelp Announces New Features Driven by Artificial Intelligence

Yelp is rolling out a series of updates as part of its end-of-year release. These enhancements include AI-driven review analysis, a customized home feed featuring diverse content, and a modernized inbox designed for business owners.

AI-Powered Review Insights for Consumers

For users, Yelp is now categorizing reviews based on key aspects like food quality, the level of service provided, and the overall ambiance. Each category receives a sentiment score ranging from 1 to 100, indicating positive, neutral, or critical feedback.

Tapping on a specific category within a listing will display relevant reviews that have been highlighted within the application. Currently, these AI-powered insights are being implemented for restaurants, food establishments, and nightlife venues on the iOS platform.

Yelp already provides AI-generated summaries for businesses at the top of their listing pages. This new functionality builds upon that by analyzing a wealth of review data to pinpoint specific business attributes.

Understanding the Technology Behind the Insights

Craig Saldanha of Yelp explained that large language models are employed to categorize and assess the sentiment expressed in reviews, even when specific themes aren’t directly mentioned in the text.

“These LLMs enable us to recognize and classify themes within reviews, even if those themes aren’t explicitly stated. For instance, a comment like ‘drinks were served promptly’ would be categorized under ‘service,’ despite the absence of the word ‘service’ itself,” Saldanha stated in correspondence with TechCrunch.

Enhanced User Feed and Recognitions

Following the launch of a new visual feed earlier in the year, Yelp is expanding the content formats available. These include automatically playing user-submitted videos, user reviews, trending searches, and listings of popular businesses in the user’s vicinity.

User recognitions – labels awarded for completing specific achievements – will now be displayed alongside their reviews. Additionally, new badges related to tipping practices are being added to help users understand tipping policies at each location.

Improved Connection with Service Professionals

Yelp’s AI-powered assistant, designed to connect users with various service providers like movers or cleaning services, has been updated. Users can now opt to be contacted by these professionals via text message or phone call.

To protect user privacy, Yelp will mask the user’s actual phone number when service professionals initiate calls regarding a project.

When editing project details, users can now broadcast updates to service providers they’ve already contacted, allowing businesses to submit revised quotes based on the new information.

Updates for Business Owners

Yelp is integrating with Apple Maps, providing users with a button to directly request a quote from a service provider. Furthermore, business inboxes are being redesigned with updated job cards and AI-powered summaries that highlight key job details.

Leveraging Data for Enhanced Insights

A central theme for Yelp this year has been utilizing existing data to deliver more informative experiences. These new features are also being incorporated into the Yelp Fusion API.

“The distinguishing factor for Yelp remains the vast number of reviews we possess. LLMs empower us to analyze all of this data in a novel and accelerated manner. This allows us to present information to consumers in a way that is both precise and personalized – enabling them to find exactly what they’re looking for,” explained Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer, in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

Competition in the AI-Powered Review Space

Yelp’s competitor, Google, is also employing existing review data to generate AI-powered summaries of places featured on Google Maps.