Yelp is releasing a number of new options as a part of its year-end launch, together with AI-powered evaluation insights, a customized dwelling feed with new content material varieties, and a redesigned inbox for enterprise homeowners.
In terms of user-facing options, the corporate is now highlighting evaluations in numerous classes, together with meals high quality, service, and ambiance. Every of those classes has a sentiment rating of 1 to 100, with scores together with optimistic, impartial, and significant. While you faucet on any of those classes for a list, you will notice related evaluations highlighted on the app. Yelp is at present including these AI-powered insights for restaurant, meals, and nightlife companies on iOS.
Yelp already reveals AI-powered summaries for companies on the high of the itemizing. Now, the corporate is tapping right into a trove of use information by way of evaluations to spotlight completely different points of a enterprise.
Within the context of this launch, Yelp’s Craig Saldanha highlighted that enormous language fashions attempt to categorize and analyze the sentiment of the evaluations even when the evaluation textual content explicitly doesn’t point out a theme.
“These LLMs enable us to establish and categorize themes in evaluations even after they aren’t explicitly talked about within the evaluation textual content. For instance, a evaluation that claims, ‘drinks got here out shortly’ can be categorized underneath ‘service,’ regardless that the phrase ‘service’ isn’t used,” he informed TechCrunch over electronic mail.
Earlier this 12 months, the corporate launched a brand new visible feed. Now, it’s including extra content material codecs to the feed, together with autoplay consumer movies, consumer evaluations, trending searches, and well-liked companies round you.
The app will now present recognitions — labels that customers get when they full particular achievements — alongside their evaluations. The itemizing service can be including new badges associated to tipping, so customers can perceive how tipping works at that specific place.
Yelp launched its AI-powered assistant to join you higher with completely different companies — assume movers, dwelling cleansing, contractors, and so on. Now, the corporate means that you can embody an choice to let companies professionals contact you thru textual content or cellphone calls. For consumer privateness, Yelp will masks your cellphone quantity when professionals name you for a mission.
The corporate can be including the power to broadcast your mission to service suppliers you’ve gotten already contacted if you edit particulars. This permits companies to submit a brand new quote in your mission primarily based on new particulars.
On the enterprise facet, Yelp is integrating with Apple Maps to point out a button to customers to request a quote from a service. The corporate can be revamping inboxes for companies with redesigned job playing cards and AI-powered summaries highlighting job info.
Utilizing current information to floor completely different varieties of knowledge has been an actual theme for Yelp this 12 months. The corporate additionally launched a few of these options to its Yelp Fusion API.
“The true differentiator of Yelp is the a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of evaluations that we’ve got. LLMs primarily enable us to parse all of that information in a approach and at a pace that we’ve by no means had earlier than. It permits us to current info to customers in a approach that feels each exact, in addition to private — now you can discover that needle within the haystack.” The corporate’s chief product officer, Craig Saldanha, informed TechCrunch in an interview earlier this 12 months.
Yelp’s rival, Google, can be leveraging current evaluation information to present AI-powered summaries of locations on Google Maps.
