Yelp adds AI-powered review insights to restaurants
Yelp is releasing several new features as part of its year-end release, including AI-powered review insights, a personalized home feed with new content types, and a redesigned inbox for business owners.
When it comes to user-facing features, the company is now highlighting reviews in different categories, including food quality, service, and ambiance. Each of these categories has a sentiment score of 1 to 100, with ratings including positive, neutral, and critical. When you tap on any of these categories for a listing, you will see relevant reviews highlighted on the app. Yelp is currently adding these AI-powered insights for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses on iOS.
Yelp already shows AI-powered summaries for businesses at the top of the listing. Now, the company is tapping into a trove of use data in terms of reviews to highlight different aspects of a business.
In the context of this launch, Yelp’s Craig Saldanha highlighted that large language models try to categorize and analyze the sentiment of the reviews even if the review text explicitly doesn’t mention a theme.
“These LLMs allow us to identify and categorize themes in reviews even when they aren’t explicitly mentioned in the review text. For example, a review that says, ‘drinks came out quickly’ would be categorized under ‘service,’ even though the word ‘service’ isn’t used,” he told TechCrunch over email.
Earlier this year, the company launched a new visual feed. Now, it is adding more content formats to the feed, including autoplay user videos, user reviews, trending searches, and popular businesses around you.
The app will now show recognitions — labels that users get when they complete specific achievements — alongside their reviews. The listing service is also adding new badges related to tipping, so users can understand how tipping works at that particular place.
Yelp launched its AI-powered assistant to connect you better with different businesses — think movers, home cleaning, contractors, etc. Now, the company allows you to include an option to let services pros contact you through text or phone calls. For user privacy, Yelp will mask your phone number when pros call you for a project.
The company is also adding the ability to broadcast your project to service providers you have already contacted when you edit details. This allows businesses to submit a new quote for your project based on new details.
On the business side, Yelp is integrating with Apple Maps to show a button to users to request a quote from a service. The company is also revamping inboxes for businesses with redesigned job cards and AI-powered summaries highlighting job information.
Using existing data to surface different kinds of information has been a real theme for Yelp this year. The company also introduced some of these features to its Yelp Fusion API.
“The real differentiator of Yelp is the hundreds of millions of reviews that we have. LLMs essentially allow us to parse all of that data in a way and at a speed that we’ve never had before. It allows us to present information to consumers in a way that feels both precise, as well as personal — you can now find that needle in the haystack.” The company’s chief product officer, Craig Saldanha, told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.
Yelp’s rival, Google, is also leveraging existing review data to show AI-powered summaries of places on Google Maps.
