Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Yelp's AI Assistant Can Now Book Restaurants, Doctors, and More

MacRumors

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster


Yelp is introducing an expanded version of its Yelp Assistant, an agentic chatbot that is able to answer questions, suggest places to visit, and complete tasks like booking a restaurant reservation.

yelp-ai-assistant.jpg

Answers rely on hundreds of millions of Yelp reviews sourced from real people, which Yelp says allows the assistant to address "complex and highly specific requests." Yelp Assistant was previously available for hiring service professionals and getting answers to questions about businesses, but now it is available across all Yelp categories.

Users are able to ask specific questions when looking for a location, such as "birthday dinner spots with vegan options and heated outdoor seating," or "top-rated gyms with group classes and childcare."

With the AI Assistant, users can start out by asking questions to find a suitable location, and then make reservations, book appointments, place delivery orders, or get quotes in the same conversation. Yelp is adding new integrated services including Vagaro, Zocdoc, and Calendly.


There is a new AI-powered personalization model for the Yelp home feed on the iPhone and iPad, and it is able to surface more relevant content and improved recommendations.

Yelp is also updating its AI Menu Vision feature with support for photo overlays so users can see what popular dishes, drinks, and desserts look like.

The Yelp Assistant is rolling out today and it is accessible through a new Assistant tab in the Yelp app.

Article Link: Yelp's AI Assistant Can Now Book Restaurants, Doctors, and More
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/21/yelp-ai-assistant/
  • Haha
  • Angry
  • Sad
Reactions: Z-4195, jw2002 and KeithBN
Not sure how this is any benefit. Whenever I book there are always adjustments based on who’s going. For example if our time slot isn’t available is an earlier or later time acceptable, or is someone in the party unavailable at the alternate time.

So I end up using the restaurants website for scheduling so I can make all decisions myself.

AI might learn my preferences, but how will it know the preferences of everyone in our party? If I have to answer a bunch of questions and qualify them later then what’s the advantage over just booking myself directly?
 
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: jw2002, Mr_Ed, terrapinjess and 5 others
I am so sick of Yelp! It makes me mad Apple still gives them the time of day just because they were one of the big early apps. They're completely irrelevant these days and are a glorified small business extortion scheme. They take advantage of their SEO ability to rank on Google to try and strong arm smaller business owners through their sales people to get businesses to pay for the privilege to actually have control over the pages Yelp or its users made.

I work in marketing. These jokers call where I work nonstop because we won't fork over money to them. They try to make it seem like there's an actual problem going on and they try to get employees like me in trouble when you ignore them. I've literally had them call up or email all the various owners of where I work and put me on blast basically over not giving them money! The owners always just laugh it off and remind them that they too do not give a crap about Yelp.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
  • Wow
Reactions: boswald, marte91, jw2002 and 7 others
WarmWinterHat said:
What? Yelp is still actively doing things? Some of the places here haven't been reviewed by anyone in 5 years or longer.. Who still actually uses it.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I consider the fact that Yelp reviews are in Apple Maps a strike against AM. Yelp just looks more useless as time goes on.

When I look for reviews on a business and it has 25 old reviews on Yelp and 450 on Google Maps including reviews made in the last month, tells me all I need to know about Yelp.
 
  • Like
Reactions: marte91, jw2002, freedomlinux and 3 others
Can it let me use their website without logging me in to an app because that's the only thing I care about and Yelp doesn't do it
 
  • Like
Reactions: jw2002
Capeto said:
I’m so glad we’re facing RAM shortages for the foreseeable future - impacting anything that remotely touches a computer or has one in it - just so that we can save 10 seconds booking something on Yelp.
Click to expand...
That's not fair, it's far more fun than that. You get to save 10 seconds booking something on Yelp, then waste some time making sure that the booking really *is* what you asked it to be and not some random hallucination or other general janky LLM-based agentic cockup, and if it really is a cockup then you get to have even more fun cancelling the mistake and trying all over again.

It's the future!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Capeto and maxoakland
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back