Yelp is out with its annual Fall Product Release, and it’s a doozy. The wide-ranging feature blitz is heavy on AI (as expected), including Menu Vision, Yelp Host, Yelp Receptionist, natural language search and updates to Yelp Assistant. This follows the cadence of Yelp’s big bi-annual feature releases.
To save you time, here are some quick highlights we extracted – the greatest hits from his batch of Yelp updates.
– The new Yelp Assistant uses AI to answer questions about restaurants, bars, local attractions, retailers, and other top categories. It’s natural-language enabled for more intuitive interactions. We gave it a try and will circle back in a separate post to dive deeper.
– Menu Vision is a new AI-powered feature that makes it easier to decide what to order by letting you point your phone at a menu to see photos, reviews, and details for dishes.
– Natural language and voice search make it easy to find what you need on Yelp by searching the way you’d speak, with smarter, more relevant results and suggestions.
– Popular Offerings uses LLMs to highlight the most mentioned items, services, or experiences for a business, giving you a quick visual snapshot of what people love most.
– RepairPal appointment scheduling for auto shops, offers AI-organized before and after photos, and response quality badges.
– Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist are two new AI-powered call answering functions help restaurants and local businesses manage calls, leads, and reservations.
First Line of Defense
To stay focused, we’ll drill deeper into a few of the features listed above (and revisit the rest as they see adoption and impact in the coming months). Specifically, the features that jumped out most to us are Yelp Host and Receptionist, given their potential to address a longstanding SMB pain points.
Starting with Yelp Host, it lives in the business-facing Yelp Guest Manager. Meant for guest-based businesses, it manages reservations and waitlists while automating customer-facing interactions like taking and updating bookings. It can be customized with AI personas that match the business.
Yelp Receptionist meanwhile provides similar functions, but tailored more towards services (think: home services, professional services, etc.). As such, it does things like help new customers set appointments, gather project details, qualify incoming leads, and send call summaries to the SMBs’ Yelp Inbox.
Both features have a common function: to field incoming calls. Though they process different kinds of information, the goal is the same for each: a first line of defense to answer and qualify calls. That in turn serves the larger purpose of freeing up SMBs to be the dentists, roofers, and nail artists they want to be.
“The real unlocks for Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist aren’t just making reservations or capturing new leads—it’s about what staff is able to do when calls aren’t taking up their time,” Yelp Chief Product Officer Craig Saldanha told Localogy Insider. “For restaurants, that’s creating great experiences for their customers, and for other local businesses, it means more time to address customer questions and land new projects.”
Dirty Little Secret
Stepping back, we’ve always said that the dirty little secret in the SMB world is that businesses pay ample amounts for leads… then don’t answer the phone. As Scorpion CRO Jamie Adams said at the recent Street Fight Live, “SMBs don’t have a marketing problem… they have an operational problem.”
Connecting the dots, this is the underexposed place where AI could end up having the most impact in the world of SMB advertising and marketing. In all the punditry around how AI will transform local marketing and SMB operations, this angle is largely missed… but it’s our dark-horse favorite.
The reason goes back to the factors that give AI staying power with SMBs. It will resonate where it can offload rote tasks that SMBs dread doing, such as marketing copy or answering the phone. These don’t align with the AI functions that get us excited in tech & media worlds… but they do land with Main Street.
We’re also seeing a trend where smart SMB SaaS providers are picking up on this angle. Naming names, a few that come to mind from recent history include Vendasta’s new AI receptionist and vcita’s innovations around its InTandem product. Yelp now joins that list and we’ll watch closely where it takes it.
“Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist help local restaurants and businesses make reservations and handle calls,” said Saldanha, “but also help them reclaim their time so they can focus on what they do best.”
