Yelp's New AI Agent Will Call Restaurants So You Don't Have To

Yelp will now have an AI voice agent call a restaurant for you, check the wait time and text you the answer. The feature, called Check for Me, is rolling out on restaurant pages inside the Yelp app.

Here's how it works: users enter their party size and phone number on a restaurant's page. The AI agent then places the call on the user's behalf, asks about wait times and sends the results by text. The user decides from there whether to go.

The launch puts Yelp in fast company. Over the last few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo and Muse have added the ability to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Yelp's move extends the same idea — voice agents handling phone calls humans used to make — into restaurant discovery.

What's the catch with agent-to-agent calls?

There's a wrinkle. Yelp debuted its own voice solution for restaurants and service providers last year. That means the platform now covers both sides of the call: the consumer's agent ringing up, and possibly a restaurant's agent answering.

Yelp acknowledges the possibility that a user's agent will talk to the restaurant's agent, and that agent-to-agent communication might break down the conversation. Two bots negotiating a table isn't a solved problem yet. The takeaway: the tech works best when a human still picks up on the other end.

What else is changing in the Yelp app?

The Check for Me launch comes bundled with a broader update to Yelp's AI assistant, the chatbot that helps users discover restaurants and services. The changes include:

• OpenTable integration. Users can book a restaurant without leaving the Yelp app.
• Memory. The assistant now remembers preferences users mentioned in previous chats.
• Chat history. Users can access the past 30 days of chats now, with full history coming soon.
• Custom reminders. Users can ask the chatbot for recurring nudges — say, weekend activity suggestions every Friday.
• Custom lists. Users can build their own lists, starting with two defaults: "Been Here" and "Want to Go." Lists can be filtered by location, category and cuisine, reordered, annotated with notes and shared with others.

More is coming. Next month, Yelp will start showing weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Later in the year, the company plans to convert collections to lists, redesign the lists tab and add a maps view. In plain terms: Yelp is turning saved activity into an engine that keeps feeding users suggestions.

How is Yelp monetizing AI for businesses?

The consumer features are free, but Yelp is also shipping a paid product aimed at the other side of the marketplace. It's called Smart Lead Reply, and it's an AI agent that replies to customers and engages with them to qualify a lead.

Business owners will pay $30 per month for the service, and they can specify how the agent should handle conversations with customers. Yelp frames the product as part of its broader push to enhance customer support and business processes through AI. It's not alone — Meta has also been courting small businesses with AI offerings to handle inbound customer inquiries.

The pricing matters. At $30 a month, Smart Lead Reply costs less than an hour of human receptionist time in most U.S. cities, which puts lead qualification within reach of even the smallest restaurants and service providers. That's the bet: AI features users get for free, businesses pay for.

Yelp is stacking its bets across the whole marketplace — a voice agent for diners, a chatbot with memory, bookings without leaving the app, and a $30/month closer for business owners.