Yelp’s new AI features summarize customer reviews

Yelp is enhancing its platform with new AI features to help users more efficiently navigate and interpret customer reviews, introducing tools that provide quick sentiment analysis and streamlined access to specific business details.

Key Features Overview: Yelp’s latest update includes AI-powered “Review Insights” that provide quick summaries of customer sentiment about specific aspects of businesses.

• The new feature uses facial icons to display positive, neutral, or critical sentiment scores for various business aspects like food quality, service, and ambiance
• Users can click on specific topics to access relevant reviews focused on those particular aspects
• The feature is currently available on iOS for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses, with plans to expand to service categories in the coming year

Technical Implementation: The system leverages advanced language processing to analyze and categorize review content beyond explicit mentions.

• The AI system can understand context within reviews to identify relevant topics and sentiment, even when specific aspects aren’t directly mentioned
• This builds upon Yelp’s existing AI-powered review summaries feature launched in January
• The platform will soon receive an AI update to better personalize the home feed based on user preferences

Platform Enhancements: Yelp is rolling out additional features to improve user experience and content discovery.

• A new trending drop-down in the iOS search bar shows popular local search terms
• The iOS home page now includes expanded content features like new reviews, photos, and full-screen video spotlights
• Android users will receive the trending search feature in early 2024

Looking Forward: While these AI implementations represent significant steps in review aggregation and user experience, the true test will be whether they can maintain accuracy across diverse business categories and effectively filter out potential biases in customer reviews.