Over recent weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have allowed users to call businesses for support and booking appointments. Now, Yelp is adding a new feature to its app called Check for Me, which lets users get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check wait times. The feature will show up on restaurant pages in the app, where users can enter their party size and phone number. The AI agent will then call on behalf of the user to check wait times and send them the results via text message to help them decide if they want to go to that particular restaurant.

The company is also updating its Yelp AI assistant to help users discover restaurants and services. With the new OpenTable integration, users can easily book a restaurant without leaving the app. The company is adding better personalization to its assistant by having it remember preferences that users might have mentioned in previous chats. Users can access their chat history from the past 30 days in the app, with full history available soon. Users can ask the chatbot to set custom reminders, such as sending suggestions for weekend activities every Friday. The company is also letting users build their own lists, starting with two “Been Here” and “Want to Go” lists. You can filter your lists by location, category, and cuisine, reorder, add notes to items, and share them with others.

Next month, the company will start showing weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Yelp is also working on converting collections to lists and giving the lists tab a new look, rolling out later in the year, along with a maps view. To cap off all these changes, Yelp has been thinking about enhancing customer support and business processes through AI. In the new update, the company is releasing a new paid product called Smart Lead Reply, which can reply to customers and engage with them to qualify a lead. Business owners, who will be charged $30 per month for these services, can specify how an agent should handle a conversation with a customer. Other companies like Meta have also been courting small businesses with AI offerings to handle inbound customer inquiries.