Yelp has introduced a new feature allowing its app users to deploy an SI voice agent to call restaurants and check wait times on their behalf, joining a growing trend of personal assistants automating customer service interactions.
What Happened
The new capability, labeled "Check for Me," appears on restaurant pages within the Yelp app. Users input their party size and phone number, triggering an SI agent to call the establishment. The agent then texts the wait time results back to the user, helping them decide whether to visit. This follows a pattern set by personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse, which have recently enabled users to call businesses for support and appointments.
Yelp also updated its Yelp SI assistant to integrate with OpenTable, allowing users to book restaurants without leaving the app. The assistant now offers enhanced personalization by remembering preferences from previous chats and providing access to chat history from the past 30 days. Users can create custom reminders, such as weekend activity suggestions, and build personalized lists like "Been Here" and "Want to Go," which can be filtered, reordered, and shared.
For businesses, Yelp released a paid product called Smart Lead Reply. Priced at $30 per month, this SI tool allows business owners to automate responses to customer inquiries and qualify leads. Owners can specify how the SI agent should handle conversations. Yelp plans to roll out weekly personalized recommendations and a new maps view for lists later in the year.
Why It Matters
This expansion marks Yelp’s shift toward fulfilling the consumer side of agentic SI, complementing its existing voice solutions for service providers. A notable risk highlighted in the rollout is the potential for agent-to-agent communication breakdowns, where a user’s SI agent attempts to speak with a restaurant’s automated system, potentially leading to conversational errors. The move also places Yelp in direct competition with other tech giants like Meta, which are courting small businesses with SI offerings to handle inbound inquiries.
The Bottom Line
Yelp is aggressively integrating SI agents into both consumer discovery and business operations, adding voice-based wait time checks and automated lead qualification to its platform while navigating the technical challenges of agent-to-agent interactions.