Yelp Expands AI Features

Yelp today released its 2025 Fall Product Release with more than 35 new features and updates to make local discovery more conversational and personalized.

Yelp Assistant will now answer any question about a restaurant, bar, local attraction, retailer and more. Menu Vision will let diners scan menus with their phone cameras to see photos and reviews of dishes. Natural language and voice capabilities now support conversational queries. AI-powered Popular Offerings further enhance the consumer experience. For restaurants and local businesses, the company is also rolling out AI-powered call answering solutions, Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist.

"This release is a significant leap forward in Yelp's AI transformation, making discovery faster, answers instant, and experiences more personalized than ever," said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer of Yelp, in a statement. "By combining advanced [large language models] with Yelp's massive trove of authentic human content, we're able to provide recommendations and answers that are grounded in real experiences. With the latest evolution of Yelp Assistant, natural language and voice search, and the new Menu Vision, we're making Yelp conversational and removing friction for consumers. For businesses, Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist have already demonstrated how these solutions can efficiently resolve customer inquiries without staff, enabling teams to focus on customer service and streamlining operations. We're excited about the opportunities ahead to continue to transform Yelp with AI."

Yelp Assistant, first introduced in 2024 to diagnose consumers' service needs and connect them with pros, will now answer consumer questions directly on business pages for restaurants, bars, local attractions, retailers and more. Powered by large language models (LLMs), it draws on reviews, photos, business page information, and businesses' websites to deliver concise, relevant answers with supporting photos and reviews.

Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist use AI to answer and triage incoming calls. The AI can answer inquiries, ask intelligent follow-ups, take and summarize messages, transfer calls, and filter spam.

Yelp Host ;is available now for table-service restaurants and integrates with Yelp Guest Manager to manage reservations, waitlists, and SMS follow-ups.

Yelp Receptionist captures project details, helps vet leads and delivers call recordings, transcripts and summaries to the Yelp for Business inbox.

Additional features and updates from Yelp's 2025 Fall release include the following:

• Menu Vision uses AI, augmented reality, and text recognition to read menus via consumers' phone cameras and surface dish photos and review snippets. Rolling out on iOS and Android, it's available at the top of the media gallery on eligible restaurant, food and nightlife business pages.
• Natural language search lets users search with conversational, full-sentence queries, returning more relevant, intent-driven results. Additionally, voice search on iOS enables speech-to-text.
• Popular Offerings for more than 100 categories, including auto shops, hair salons, clothing stores, parks, and more. Using LLMs, it pairs review mentions with photos to surface the most frequently mentioned items, services or experiences on business pages.;
• Since acquiring RepairPal in November 2024, Yelp is now integrating RepairPal's booking system into Yelp search results and business pages to make it easier to schedule appointments with auto shops.
• AI-grouped before and after photos help showcase businesses' work for more than 100 visually driven services on desktop business pages.
• Review Insights is now expanding to services categories on iOS business pages, using LLMs to analyze reviewer sentiment on aspects like customer experience, pricing, facilities and job quality, with scores displayed above reviews to help consumers quickly find these details.
• The nationwide rollout of AI-powered response quality badges help consumers identify pros who have excellent communication. Business owners now receive real-time AI-powered guidance to improve their replies.
• AI-stitched videos are now scaled nationally and available on the home feed on iOS and Android. These videos turn human-generated reviews, photos, and videos into short narrated previews that highlight what makes a restaurant or nightlife spot unique.