Yelp has announced a slew of new features as part of its year-end release, aimed at enhancing the user experience and providing more value to business owners. The updates include AI-powered review insights, a personalized home feed with new content types, and a redesigned inbox for business owners.

One of the most significant updates is the introduction of AI-powered review insights, which categorize reviews into different aspects of a business, such as food quality, service, and ambiance. Each category is assigned a sentiment score of 1 to 100, with ratings including positive, neutral, and critical. This feature is currently available for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses on iOS.

According to Craig Saldanha, Yelp's chief product officer, the company's large language models (LLMs) enable it to identify and categorize themes in reviews even when they aren't explicitly mentioned in the review text. For instance, a review that says "drinks came out quickly" would be categorized under "service," even though the word "service" isn't used. This capability allows Yelp to provide more precise and personalized information to users.

In addition to the AI-powered review insights, Yelp is also expanding its visual feed with new content formats, including autoplay user videos, user reviews, trending searches, and popular businesses around you. The app will now display recognitions – labels that users get when they complete specific achievements – alongside their reviews. Furthermore, the listing service is adding new badges related to tipping, enabling users to better understand how tipping works at a particular establishment.

Yelp's AI-powered assistant, which connects users with various businesses, such as movers, home cleaning, and contractors, is also getting an update. Users can now opt to let service professionals contact them through text or phone calls, with Yelp masking the user's phone number for privacy. Moreover, users can broadcast their project to service providers they have already contacted when editing details, allowing businesses to submit a new quote for the project based on the updated information.

On the business side, Yelp is integrating with Apple Maps to display a button that allows users to request a quote from a service. The company is also revamping inboxes for businesses with redesigned job cards and AI-powered summaries highlighting job information. These updates aim to streamline business operations and improve communication between users and service providers.

Yelp's focus on leveraging its vast review data to surface different kinds of information has been a recurring theme this year. The company has also introduced some of these features to its Yelp Fusion API. As Saldanha noted, "The real differentiator of Yelp is the hundreds of millions of reviews that we have. LLMs essentially allow us to parse all of that data in a way and at a speed that we've never had before. It allows us to present information to consumers in a way that feels both precise, as well as personal – you can now find that needle in the haystack."

Yelp's rival, Google, is also utilizing existing review data to show AI-powered summaries of places on Google Maps. As the competition in the review and recommendation space heats up, Yelp's latest updates demonstrate its commitment to innovation and providing a more personalized and informative experience for its users.