Yelp goes all in on AI with smart menus and virtual phone agents
Yelp has launched a comprehensive suite of artificial intelligence features, including a tool named “Menu Vision,” as reported on October 21, 2025. The update is designed to change how users discover and engage with local businesses.
The new Menu Vision feature allows users to point their phone’s camera at a physical restaurant menu. This action overlays interactive bubbles on the screen, corresponding to specific dishes. Tapping these bubbles reveals user-submitted photographs of the food item, alongside relevant snippets from customer reviews. This function provides diners with immediate visual context and peer feedback, helping to inform their ordering decisions directly from the menu. The tool aims to improve the restaurant discovery experience by clarifying menu options.
This release is part of a larger update that expands Yelp’s AI assistant beyond its original focus on service professionals. The assistant now covers a wider range of businesses, including restaurants, bars, attractions, and retailers. It is programmed to answer natural language questions, remember user preferences from past searches, and provide personalized recommendations based on that interaction history. Yelp also introduced conversational and voice-search capabilities, which allow users to ask questions in ordinary language, mirroring trends from chat-style AI tools.
Additionally, the company launched two new AI phone agents, “Host” and “Receptionist,” to address staffing challenges within the service industry. These automated agents can handle customer calls 24/7, managing and modifying restaurant reservations and answering detailed questions about a restaurant’s policies. The agents are also capable of sending automated follow-up texts for confirmation and other communications.
Yelp described this initiative as its biggest AI release yet, aimed at streamlining the process of local business discovery and interaction for both consumers and business owners.