Yelp’s updated AI assistant can answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversation

For years, existing consumer platforms have tried to keep users within their app by offering more services. After the rise of the AI chatbot, the trend is to have people use the assistant for both queries and actions without leaving the conversational flow. With its latest update, Yelp is letting people ask questions, get restaurant reservations, order food delivery, and book service professionals, all through its updated AI assistant.

The company debuted the AI assistant in 2024 to help people search for different services based on their problem. It is now using the platform data paired with an AI assistant to let users do more tasks.

In a demo seen by TechCrunch, the company’s SVP of product, Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, searched for hiking places to go with a dog without a leash; looked for takeout places along the way, with an option to place an order on Doordash; looked for restaurant recommendations for a weekend plan, with an option to check out availability and book a table; and queried about painting a friends’ new Victorian house without leaving the chat.

“We would really like consumers to reconceive Yelp as a place where they can ask questions and get answers, not just that, but also complete the action. That’s Yelp reconceiving from a review platform to an answers and action platform,” he told TechCrunch over a call. “Some of the investments we’re making will be in that lane.”

Users can select a specific page for a restaurant or service when they tap on it, or ask more questions about the business. Yelp said that as the knowledge is grounded in details of the business on the platform, the business’s website, and user reviews, there is a scant chance of getting wrong answers.

The company is hosting the assistant in a new tab in the app, which is now placed in the center of the bottom navigation bar, so users are likely to visit it more often. The assistant will be available on iOS and Android at launch and will work with eligible business pages, including restaurants, retail shops, and attractions. The company said that the desktop version and rollout across all kinds of businesses are slated for later in the year.

Apart from fetching information, Yelp also announced integration with external providers to complete an action, like place an order or appointment. Users can now order food through DoorDash and Grubhub, book fitness or beauty appointments through Vagaro, a doctor’s appointment through ZocDoc, and a car repair through Repairpal. Plus, it also offers a Calendly integration for other kinds of businesses that allow appointment booking.

Notably, all these actions will lead you to a specific provider’s app or page, meaning this is not “agentic” in nature, where the entire transaction is completed within the chat window. Kuduvalli mentioned that while the redirections are the way Yelp is set up now, it might not “remain that way” in the future.

However, it’s hard to say how agentic pipelines might work with other services for cases when the user doesn’t specify whether they want to order food through DoorDash or Grubhub.

Besides the new AI assistant, Yelp is rolling out a few quality-of-life updates to the app. Last year, it launched the ability for people to scan a menu and see what dishes look like through photos other users posted. Now, users can look at those dishes within the app as they are scanning a menu.

What’s more, Yelp said that users will be able to search the media gallery of a business using natural language queries instead of keywords. Plus, the company will offer an AI-powered tagging and grouping feature for before and after photos to business owners to avoid manual work.