“We want to build a product to help convert the leads that [normally might be] missed.” That’s how Yelp’s Chief Product Officer Craig Saldanha frames the company’s latest AI new feature. Long seen as a go-to destination for restaurant reviews and service listings, Yelp is now thinking of itself as something much bigger: a real-time, AI-native interface between local businesses and consumers. Whether you're booking a birthday dinner or scheduling a mechanic to inspect an oil leak, Yelp’s AI-powered voice agents and visual assistants want to manage the entire interaction conversationally, intelligently, and without human lag.
Yelp is already piloting AI voice agents that can answer calls, understand context, manage reservations, and escalate when needed, all without complex API integrations or manual onboarding. Using OpenAI’s Realtime API in conjunction with Yelp’s proprietary knowledge graph, these agents handle everything from customized greetings to post-call summaries and transcripts.
And that’s just one of the 15 new AI and product updates Yelp announced this week. The changes cut across the business from AI-powered photo recognition in Yelp Assistant, to response quality badges for service professionals, and even Zapier-powered lead integrations for multi-location enterprises.
