Yelp Launches AI Voice Agents to Transform Customer Service for Restaurants and Service Providers
Yelp is revolutionizing customer service with its new AI-powered voice agents. Announced on April 29, 2025, these advanced voice agents are designed to help restaurants and service providers manage calls, answer customer inquiries, and streamline operations like managing waitlists. The goal? To improve efficiency and ensure businesses never miss out on potential customers, even when staff are unavailable to take calls.
The key advantage of Yelp’s AI voice agents lies in their ease of integration. Unlike traditional systems that require complex setup or API connections, Yelp’s solution leverages existing business metadata. This means restaurants, for example, can easily connect the voice agent to their management software for seamless tasks like sending reservation details to customers post-call. This intuitive, user-friendly system ensures that businesses can provide a high-quality customer experience without the technical hassle.
These AI agents also come equipped with smart features like automatic spam filtering and call analytics. By filtering out irrelevant calls and offering detailed call summaries, businesses can focus on what truly matters. For complex queries, the AI seamlessly hands off the conversation to a human operator, ensuring customers are always taken care of. Plus, after each call, businesses receive a transcript and recording to help track interactions and improve service quality.
Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer, emphasized that many professionals in the service industry struggle to answer calls due to their busy environments. "We wanted to build a product that helps convert leads that might otherwise be missed," he explained. With AI handling the basics, staff can focus on providing personalized, high-value interactions when needed.
Powered by OpenAI’s Realtime API, Yelp’s voice agents draw from the company’s vast knowledge graph to deliver more natural conversations and handle follow-up questions with ease. The combination of cutting-edge technology and Yelp’s data gives the platform an edge over competitors. Yelp continues to refine its voice tech to ensure top-notch performance in terms of speech recognition, response accuracy, and customer satisfaction.
Over time, Saldanha believes voice tech will become standardized, with differentiation coming from the quality of the underlying data and the AI’s ability to understand and address customer needs. With these AI voice agents, Yelp is setting itself up to lead the way in customer service innovation, offering businesses an invaluable tool to enhance their operations and drive success.
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