Yelp can now call on your behalf to check wait times at a restaurant

Yelp is rolling out a new feature called Check for Me that lets its app users have a voice agent call a restaurant to ask about wait times. The option will appear on restaurant pages. Users enter their party size and phone number, and the AI does the calling, then texts back the result so they can decide whether to go.

The move follows a wave of similar tools from assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse, which have started making calls for customer support and booking. Yelp already had the restaurant and service-provider side covered last year with its voice solution. Now it is trying to close the loop on the consumer side, even though there’s a risk that an agent ends up talking to another agent and the whole thing gets awkward fast.

Yelp is also updating its AI assistant for discovery and booking. With a new OpenTable integration, users can reserve a table without leaving the app. The assistant is getting better personalization too, with memory for preferences mentioned in earlier chats. Chat history from the past 30 days will be available in the app, with full history coming later.

The assistant can also handle custom reminders, such as weekly suggestions for weekend activities. And Yelp is adding user-built lists, starting with “Been Here” and “Want to Go.” Those lists can be filtered by location, category, and cuisine, reordered, annotated, and shared. Next month, Yelp plans to surface weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings, while later in the year it will convert collections into lists and give that tab a new look, plus a maps view.

On the business side, Yelp is launching Smart Lead Reply, a paid tool that can answer customers and help qualify leads. Business owners will pay $30 per month and can set rules for how the agent should handle conversations. Meta and others are chasing the same small-business AI money, because apparently every inbox now needs a robot with a script.