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San Francisco-based live-review service Yelp has launched an AI receptionist designed to assist restaurants by taking calls and bookings.
The company said the AI is ideal for understaffed small restaurants and businesses, boasting the ability to take calls at all times, handle reservations and answer customer questions.
“For many businesses, reliable, around‑the‑clock call handling is essential to capture every lead and best serve your customers. But when you’re understaffed, on a job site, or simply busy, even one missed call can mean significant lost revenue,” said Yelp chief product officer Craig Saldanha.
“Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist ask intelligent follow-up questions, take and summarise messages, manage reservations and leads, transfer callers when needed, and filter spam.
“Unlike alternative call bots, these solutions combine large language models with Yelp’s high-quality data and proprietary voice system, for a smarter, faster, and more human-like AI voice tailored to each individual business.”
Yelp said the AI comes pre-trained using Yelp business data and is fully customisable to reflect the business using it, allowing for the AI agent’s name, voice and personal greetings to be customised. The questions the AI asks customers and provided information like special offers can also be tweaked. Additionally, the AI can send SMS follow-ups with menus, links to take credit card deposits, waitlists and more.
Yelp said businesses that use the service will be given a dedicated phone number for it, with the option of call forwarding available.
Currently in Beta, Yelp’s AI offerings have been praised by business owners.
“Yelp is truly the go-to platform for restaurants and the service industry. I’ve already been very satisfied with the return on ad spend, and now having the AI answering service increases the overall value,” said MUN Korean Steakhouse CEO Jongpil Kim.
“It’ll save a lot of money for restaurant owners by handling calls that usually distract servers and pulls them away from serving diners, especially on busy nights. It elevates the guest experience because the servers or host can pay more attention to those already onsite, making Yelp Host money well spent. So just those two things are something every restaurant owner would kill to have.”
While AI services like these are great for businesses that may be struggling with understaffing, they also present a major threat to hospitality workers, minimum-wage staffers, and those looking for their first job, by providing a cost-efficient alternative to human staff.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that AI could eliminate entire job categories, seemingly an admission that the technology is unlikely to be beneficial to the many, but great at cutting costs for the few.
“Some areas, again, I think (will be) just like totally, totally gone,” he said, referring to customer support roles, not unlike the Yelp AI services.
“That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine … Now you call one of those things and AI answers.”
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