Yelp adds AI-powered review data to restaurants

Yelp is rolling out a number of new features as part of its year-end release, including AI-driven analytics data, 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 across various categories, including food quality, service and ambiance. Each of these categories has a sentiment score ranging from 1 to 100, with positive, neutral, and critical. When you tap on any of these categories for a list, you’ll see the relevant reviews highlighted in the app. Yelp is currently adding these AI-powered insights for restaurant, dining and nightlife businesses on iOS.

Yelp already shows AI-powered summaries for businesses at the top of the list. The company now uses usage data in terms of reviews to highlight different aspects of a business.

In the context of this launch, Yelp’s Craig Saldanha pointed out that large language models attempt to categorize and analyze the sentiment of reviews, even if the review text does not 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’ would be classified under ‘service’ even though the word ‘service’ is not used,” he told TechCrunch via email.

The company started operating at the beginning of this year new visual tape. It now adds more content formats to the feed, including autoplay of user videos, user reviews, trending searches and popular businesses around you.

The app will now show recognitions – tags that users have earned when they complete specific achievements – along with their reviews. The listing service is also adding new tipping icons so users can understand how luggage works at that location.

Yelp has launched its AI-powered assistant better connect you with different businesses — movers, house cleaners, contractors, etc. think about it. The company now allows you to enter an option that allows the services professionals to contact you via text or phone calls. For user privacy, Yelp will mask your phone number when professionals call you for a project.

The company also adds the ability to broadcast your project to service providers you’ve already contacted while editing details. This allows businesses to submit a new proposal for your project based on the new details.

On the business side, Yelp integrates with Apple Maps to show users a button to request a price from the service. The company is also updating inboxes for businesses with redesigned business cards and AI-powered summaries that highlight business information.

Using existing data to uncover different types of information has been a real theme for Yelp this year. The company has also introduced some of these features its Yelp Fusion API.

“The real differentiator of Yelp is our hundreds of millions of reviews. LLMs actually allow us to analyze all the data in a way and speed that we have never seen before. This 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. interview earlier this year.

Yelp’s competitor Google also uses existing research data display AI-powered summaries of places On Google Maps.