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Yelp is launching 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 now highlights reviews in different categories, including food quality, service and ambiance. Each of these categories has a sentiment score ranging from 1 to 100, with ratings including positive, neutral, and critical. When you tap on any of these categories to get a list, you’ll see related reviews highlighted in the app. Yelp is currently adding these AI-powered insights for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses on iOS.
Yelp already displays AI-powered summaries of businesses at the top of the list. Now, the company is leveraging a wealth of usage data in terms of reviews to highlight different aspects of the business.
In the context of this launch, Yelp’s Craig Saldanha highlighted that large language models attempt to classify and analyze review sentiment even if the review text doesn’t explicitly mention a topic.
“These LLMs allow us to identify and categorize themes in reviews even when they are not explicitly mentioned in the review text. For example, a review that says ‘Drinks came out quickly’ will be categorized as ‘Service’, even though the word ‘service’ is not used,” As he told TechCrunch via email.
Earlier this year, the company launched a new visual feed. Now, more content formats are being added to the feed, including auto-playing user videos, user reviews, trending searches, and popular businesses around you.
The app will now display certificates of appreciation — the ratings users receive when completing specific achievements — alongside their reviews. The menu service is also adding new badges related to tips, so users can understand how tipping works at that specific location.
Yelp has launched its AI-powered assistant to better connect you with different businesses — like moving companies, home cleaning, contractors, etc. Now, the company allows you to include an option to let service professionals contact you through text messages or phone calls. For user privacy, Yelp will hide your phone number when professionals contact you for a project.
The company is also adding the ability to broadcast your project to providers you’ve already connected to when editing the details. This allows companies to provide a new quote for your project based on the new details.
On the business side, Yelp is integrating with Apple Maps to show users a button to request a quote from a service. The company is also revamping corporate inboxes with redesigned business cards and AI-powered summaries that highlight job information.
Using existing data to display different types of information has been a real theme for Yelp this year. The company has also introduced some of these features to Yelp Fusion API.
“What really sets Yelp apart is the hundreds of millions of reviews that we have. LLMs basically allow us to analyze all that data in a way and at a speed that we never had before. It allows us to deliver information to consumers in a way that feels both accurate and personal — now you can find that needle.” In the haystack, Craig Saldanha, the company’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.
Yelp competitor Google is leveraging existing review data to display AI-powered summaries of places on Google Maps.
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