What You Should Know
Yelp’s going to look different as the company leans into a more visual home page and AI summaries of the reviews it collects.
Artificial intelligence (AI) requires material from real people to be genuinely useful, and Yelp is counting on your reviews to feed the new AI-generated summary presented at the app’s top.
Craig Saldanha, Yelp Chief Product Officer, talked about all of the changes coming to the Yelp app in a blog post published on Tuesday. Among these are the new “AI-powered business summaries.” New “recognitions” for users who publish reviews have also been announced, as well as improvements to quotation requests and Projects within the app.
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“New AI-powered business summaries surface short, unique insights that detail what you can expect at a business; and fun, new Recognitions celebrate your helpful reviews,” Saldanha added in a blog post.
The business descriptions rely on Yelp user evaluations to provide a brief overview of what “the business is best known for.” To encourage additional reviews, Yelp is introducing a series of Recognitions—165 in total—that will appear on your profile if you post at least three reviews for businesses in the same category within a year. Yelp also intends to highlight the recognitions on its business pages “in the coming months.”
To assist you in writing more reviews, Yelp is boosting the number of “interactive review topics” available. In the words of Saldanha, “Review topics identify when common themes are covered in reviews… to remind you of helpful details of your experience that other people would want to know about.”
The photographs you view on your Yelp home feed are also being enhanced with AI. The feed will be more visual, with AI surfacing relevant photographs, as well as autoplay videos from businesses and Yelp Elites’ Collections. User videos will also be posted “in the coming months.”
Yelp rounded out the update with a host of new features for businesses as well. Most of the features for Yelp users released on Tuesday apply to iOS devices, with some (like AI-powered business summaries and user videos) coming to Android users in the future.