# Yelp Serves Up AI Voice Agents for Restaurants and Service Providers

## Yelp Serves Up AI Voice Agents for Restaurants and Service Providers

Yelp is rolling out a new initiative designed to streamline customer interactions for restaurants and service providers: AI-powered voice agents. Announced on Tuesday, these agents aim to handle incoming calls, answer frequently asked questions, and even manage tasks such as adding customers to restaurant waitlists, all without the need for complex setups or API integrations.

According to Yelp, these voice agents leverage existing metadata and business data, including pronunciation guides and custom greetings, to provide a seamless experience. For restaurants, the agents can integrate directly with existing management software, automatically sending reservation details to customers after a call.

Beyond basic answering services, Yelp’s AI can also filter spam calls and provide call analytics to businesses. When a request exceeds the AI’s capabilities, the call is seamlessly transferred to a human operator. Following each call, businesses receive a comprehensive summary, including a transcript and recording for quality assurance and training purposes.

“Often, pros are working in difficult conditions and can’t take a call,” Yelp Chief Product Officer Craig Saldanha explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “We wanted to build a product to help convert the leads that [normally might be] missed.”

Yelp is leveraging OpenAI’s Realtime API to facilitate end-to-end calling. This, combined with Yelp’s robust knowledge graph, allows the AI agents to engage in more dynamic conversations, asking and responding to follow-up questions with greater accuracy.

The company emphasizes its commitment to continuous improvement, stating that they are constantly evaluating new AI models to optimize for latency, speech recognition accuracy, and overall customer experience.

Saldanha anticipates that voice technology will become increasingly commoditized over time. Therefore, Yelp’s competitive advantage lies in its vast database and the sophisticated manner in which its AI processes customer queries. By focusing on data-driven insights and intelligent response handling, Yelp aims to provide a superior voice agent solution for businesses seeking to enhance their customer service capabilities.