Yelp is expanding its suite of AI tools by letting users ask a voice agent to call a restaurant and find out current wait times. The new “Check for Me” button appears on restaurant pages within the Yelp app. After entering the size of their party and a phone number, the AI‑powered agent dials the eatery on the user’s behalf, receives the wait estimate and then texts the information back so the user can decide whether to go.
The feature follows a recent wave of personal assistants such as Instinct, Fo and Muse that have given users the ability to call businesses for support or to book appointments. Yelp first rolled out a voice solution for restaurants and other service providers last year, and “Check for Me” completes the consumer‑side of that offering. The company notes that conversations could sometimes involve a restaurant’s automated system, which might cause occasional hiccups in the dialogue.
Alongside the new wait‑time checker, Yelp is refreshing its AI assistant that helps people discover places to eat and services to use. An OpenTable integration now lets users reserve a table without leaving the Yelp app. The assistant also remembers preferences mentioned in earlier chats, and users can view their conversation history for the past 30 days, with a full archive slated to arrive soon. Users can ask the bot to set custom reminders, such as sending weekend‑activity suggestions every Friday.
Yelp is also giving users more control over their own collections. Two starter lists – “Been Here” and “Want to Go” – let people organize venues by location, category or cuisine, reorder items, add notes and share the lists with friends. Starting next month, the platform will surface weekly personalized recommendations based on the items users have saved and ranked. Later this year, Yelp plans to convert existing collections into the new list format, redesign the Lists tab and add a map view.
On the business side, Yelp is launching a paid AI product called Smart Lead Reply. For $30 a month, owners can have the system respond to incoming customer messages and qualify leads, with the ability to set rules for how the agent should handle each conversation. The move mirrors similar AI offerings from companies like Meta that are targeting small businesses with tools for inbound customer inquiries.
The article was written by Ivan Mehta, who covers global consumer‑tech news for TechCrunch from India. He previously wrote for the Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach him at the email address provided in the original piece or via encrypted message on Signal.