The AI bots will be capable of conversing with callers over the phone and carrying out a multitude of tasks. These include placing an order, making a reservation or asking if the place of business offers a particular service. Yelp is branding the features as a way for businesses to never miss calls from customers.
Shown off in a video with a happy upbeat score in the background, Yelp says that this feature will be made available to business owners very soon. On paper it does seem to be a very nifty tool but I can’t help but think that this is also likely going to lead to some layoffs in the near future.
The AI capabilities shown off in the video were also painfully familiar to anyone who has dabbled with LLM models for a while. It responded in a very similar fashion to other existing AI chat bots and I think that Yelp should really customize it a bit more to give it some personality.
Yelp shows off its upcoming AI call answering service. | Video credit — Yelp
There are some interesting bits to look at here too. For example the AI bot is apparently capable of following a conversation so well that it can even note down your phone number. This makes it almost certain that Yelp’s AI will use LLM-powered voice recognition like ‘Whisper’ by OpenAI. Standard voice recognition is not nearly capable enough to do what the video above shows.
Many companies, like Amazon for example, use AI for text-based customer support. This leads to some hilarious moments where a user is able to bypass the AI bot’s instructions and make it partake in other activities instead. These kinks are being ironed out pretty quickly however and Yelp’s use of AI for calls will be one of the first in the world.
The biggest issue with this, in my opinion, is the fact that customers who don’t want to talk to an AI will be forced to do so anyway. Asking repeatedly for a human agent may work like in other cases but booking a table really isn’t something that restaurants will want to keep human employees around for.
