Whenever you have a question about your next purchase, you are thinking about booking a hotel or you want to enjoy your night in a bar nearby, you ask the internet. You get plenty of search results when you ask the internet. You have to go through all these searches just to find the right answer.
20 years ago, the OG review site, Yelp was introduced to offer answers to all such questions. Yelp is a crowd-sourced review site, where anyone can review a product, service or business. Since it is crowd-sourced, people from all around the world offer reviews here. Nearly all businesses have Yelp accounts; they embed Yelp reviews on their sites because they know of its importance.
Just a few years ago, it was a boring review site with the sole purpose of helping users cut through all the information noise and get the answer to their questions. Thanks to AI and some new features, Yelp is slowly catching up and is on the route to becoming the next big thing.
As a business owner if you are using Yelp for your business or you are just a customer looking for online verification for your next purchase, here is how the new Yelp updates can help.
Yelp AI Assistant – How It Works?
AI is everywhere. In fact, it is expected that in just a few years, every app, every website and every online service will have AI integration. Currently, every social media site has an AI-powered search engine. This is not limited to just big search engines like Google and Bing but also extends to social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp.
Even crowd-sourced review platform like Yelp has now integrated artificial intelligence into its services i.e. through the Yelp AI Assistant. As per the initial demo, when you ask a question, the assistant mentions sponsored local pros. Regular users have mentioned that this option would only filter your business if you were running a paid business account on Yelp.
However, Yelp has clarified that AI assistant does not discriminate businesses based on sponsored on unsponsored business accounts. You can check out the new Yelp AI assistant on your phone by using a good internet service like Xfinity.
With Yelp, the use of AI will be more precise. It mainly helps in offering precise answers to the questions. For instance, user can now chat with the assistant and ask to narrow down the options. They chat with the AI assistant, ask questions about what they are looking for and then AI filters out the options that fit their needs.
This will work wonders for users who focus on certain pros. The AI assistant also asks questions, understands their needs and then recommends them certain bar, hotel or business that fits their requirements. The feature mainly helps in cutting the overall response and filtering time. With the help of this feature, user will be able to save a lot of time.
Currently, the feature is only available for iOS users only. However, Yelp has announced that AI feature will soon be available on Android as well.
What is New on Yelp?
Apart from the AI assistant feature, Yelp is also testing a short video algorithm. The platform is looking for ways to help their users filter out everything while enhancing the engagement rate. With the TikTok-based short videos, users will be able to check out video reviews.
So far, video reviews have received positive responses from customers on multiple platforms like Amazon, TikTok and other e-commerce sites. With Yelp jumping into the same realm, it is expected that users will be able to upload reviews and this will only put a seal of verification.
This feature will further help in reducing the unauthentic or paid reviews on the platform, as users will be able to verify with the video reviews. Experts are seeing this as a step towards online information authenticity, better information filtration and nullifying the overall user fake reviews.
Currently, Yelp only offers text-based reviews along with some pictures. However, with the new features, users can take real time authentic pictures and upload as proof. Yelp already takes fake reviews seriously, so this will further fortify their fake review filtration process.
With video-based reviews, pictures and written reviews, platform will priorities the reviews based on value and verification. Currently, Yelp is only testing with 12-second videos but in future, they may extend the time limit.
Apart from the video feature, Yelp is also adding the “Surprise Me” button. This button will mainly help with filtering out the best place near you that you can visit and enjoy. This feature is ideal for people who are travelling or looking for best place to visit on the go.
Wrap Up
Nearly all the sites and apps you will come across have either introduced AI or are currently testing AI features and Yelp is no exception. With the above-mentioned features, Yelp will be able to improve search on their platform as well as enhance user experience on the app.
