Yelp's Got a New Voice—and It's AI-Powered

Starting this week, Yelp is rolling out something new for restaurants and service providers: AI voice agents that can answer your calls, tackle basic questions, and even pop you onto a waitlist without anyone on the other end lifting a finger. The update was announced on Tuesday, and it's meant to make life easier for businesses that often miss calls just because they're, well, busy doing actual work.


The idea is to help professionals who are in the thick of it—whether it's flipping burgers or fixing sinks—capture those missed opportunities. Yelp's new agents don't require complex setups or painful API integrations. Instead, they tap into a business's existing info, like pronunciation guides, custom greetings, and call forwarding rules. For restaurants, these voice agents can even connect with management software to automatically send reservation details to a customer after the call. It's like having a polite, AI-powered maître d'.

Yelp's agents also come with built-in spam filters, call summaries, transcripts, and recordings. They know when to call in backup too—handing things off to a human when requests get too complicated. As Yelp's Chief Product Officer Craig Saldanha put it, "We wanted to build a product to help convert the leads that [normally might be] missed." And they've done that by leaning on OpenAI's Realtime API, allowing the agents to actually carry on full conversations, complete with follow-up questions and answers.

Saldanha also pointed out that while voice tech might become more common, the real secret sauce is how well the AI understands customers and handles their needs. Yelp believes it has the upper hand here, thanks to its deep well of business data and its constantly evolving tech stack aimed at improving speed, accuracy, and overall experience.

So next time you call your favorite taco place and a super helpful "person" answers immediately—don't be surprised if it's Yelp's new digital sidekick doing the talking.

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