- Yelp’s new AI Assistant now answers detailed user questions
- The AI can interact through text or voice, and use a new feature called Menu Vision
- The impact of more AI on Yelp remains to be seen
The enhanced assistant is available on Yelp’s mobile apps. You can ask any question you might have in your own words by text or search with your voice. If you’re at a restaurant and want to know what the menu’s description translates to in real life, you can give Yelp’s new Menu Vision feature access to your camera, and it will find photos of the food.
But while the move is newsworthy for what it adds to Yelp’s ecosystem, it’s just as interesting for what it might mean for how people use Yelp. After all, Yelp built its brand on crowdsourced opinion. Deep dives into a sushi restaurant’s unique lighting scheme, brunch disasters, thoughtful, heartfelt praise for specific servers, and other messy, honest, wildly uneven tales were the point. You might have to sift through noise to find a trustworthy signal, but the noise added depth and color to the answers.
Wrapping that human sprawl in streamlined AI would seem to cut out all of that flavor text. Yelp describes the AI’s neat, well-referenced answers not as erasure of the human element, but simply as translations into more accessible forms.
Yelp’s AI doesn’t generate responses out of thin air. It draws on its community’s mountain of data: review text, tagged photos, user preferences, and business listings. That means it still depends on humans to power the machine. But if the Assistant becomes the default interface, it’s easy to imagine users no longer feeling compelled to write their own epic consumer stories.
Human Yelps
This dual-front AI rollout positions Yelp somewhere between Google Maps and a full-scale digital concierge. Menu Vision is a good example of the change. You’re out to eat. You point your phone at the menu. Like magic, the AI overlays real dish photos, prices, and review blurbs for that exact dish with no need to search or scroll through traditional reviews.
You’re not reading someone’s full impression of a meal, just a polished thumbnail of collective sentiment. But you might as well just look at the star ratings or do a keyword search if that’s what you want.
Yelp’s AI upgrades seem predicated on the idea that most users would rather have a fast, visual summary than trudge through 47 contradictory reviews. And they might be right in most cases. If Yelp once felt like a browseable bazaar of user experience, the new version wants to feel like a direct line to someone who already knows what you want.
Yelp’s moves are familiar as part of a broader trend sweeping through consumer apps. Platforms that once centered on content produced by humans are repackaging them with AI designed for speed. It’s visible from forums like Stack Overflow to Amazon‘s e-commerce hub, not to mention Google’s blitz to make AI ubiquitous across its every product. Yelp has plenty of data, making it more immediately useful (and more easily monetized) makes sense.
For most users, that’ll be a good thing. You’ll spend less time staring at star ratings and more time finding somewhere actually good. You’ll get faster recommendations, better booking flows, and less guesswork
But it’s questionable if the elements that make Yelp’s data valuable will still roll in without the messy bits. Would as many people write the useful, if brutally scathing reviews, contributing to the Assistant’s answers, if no one is going to see past the AI to read them? The Assistant’s responses cite their sources so you can dig back to the original review if you want to, but how many will choose to do so?
But for the diehards who loved the full scroll and the serendipity of stumbling into the one brilliant, bizarre, overlong review, Yelp’s new AI layer may feel like a dull straight road past a tantalizing wilderness. This might be the future of discovering local businesses, but you’ll have to hope the food at the restaurants it recommends isn’t as bland as the response to your question..
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
