Yelp using AI to enhance search features and recommendations

Yelp is hopping on the AI bandwagon, though not in the same way as Google or Microsoft.

While those other companies are all-in on talkative AI chatbots like Bard and Bing, Yelp is going with a another approach. In a company blog post on Tuesday, Yelp announced that it's incorporating large language model (LLM) into its signature business review app by way of enhancing search features.

What this actually means in practical terms is that if you search for something like "tennis courts" (the example used in Yelp's blog post), you'll automatically see snippets of user reviews that mention tennis courts underneath each business that provides tennis courts. Yelp said it's also using AI to provide search recommendations that aren't necessarily tied to your location, but could be helpful anyway.

More fun is the new 'Surprise Me!" button, which creates a "unique highly-rated recommendation" for you when you clip it. Love to hit a big button that tells me where to eat.

Anyway, Yelp's new AI features seem to be among the most tasteful we've seen in the recent AI craze. There isn't a chatbot feeding you bad information or making you question the boundaries between man and machine. Instead, it's just an AI telling you which places have good tennis courts.