Yelp's AI Assistant Now Helps Find Service Pros for Spring Projects

Yelp started out as the go-to place for finding great restaurants, but it's grown into so much more, now helping people connect with service professionals for all sorts of needs. And guess what? They're taking things up a notch with generative AI to make hiring these pros even simpler.

On Tuesday, Yelp rolled out its Spring Product Release, packed with new features for both consumers and businesses. The star of the show? Their brand-new AI assistant, designed to streamline the process of finding service professionals for everything from home makeovers to getting a fresh haircut.

How to Use Yelp Assistant

To get started with Yelp Assistant, just chat with the bot and give it the details about your project or issue. The assistant will then ask follow-up questions to nail down all the specifics.

You can answer these questions with your own words or use the handy one-click responses provided. If you need more clarity on a question, feel free to ask back—just like you would in a conversation with a real person.

Once the chatbot has all the info it needs, you'll get to review and approve the final request, which Yelp will then send out to local professionals. These pros can use the details to reach out to you with their suggestions and quotes.

When I gave Yelp Assistant a whirl, I simply typed, "I'm looking for a hairstylist in Brooklyn." The assistant responded with follow-up questions that were spot-on for finding the perfect stylist.

I opted for the one-click responses, and they worked like a charm. In no time, Yelp crafted a request that I could have sent off to professionals in the area. You can check out my full interaction in the screenshot below.

Yelp's Assistant is powered by a mix of large language models, including those from OpenAI and Yelp's own model, which is trained on a wealth of data from Yelp's business info, user inputs from the Request a Quote feature, and more.

Having played around with Yelp Assistant early on, I can tell you it's as user-friendly as it sounds. If you're on iOS, you can start using it right away from the Project tab at the bottom of the app. Android users, don't worry—Yelp plans to roll it out to you later this summer.

More Features in the Works

Yelp's also introduced a new Project Ideas feature in the same Projects tab, which is all about sparking inspiration and offering recommendations for your next home upgrade. Come summer, Yelp aims to enhance Project Ideas with predictive analysis to deliver even more tailored suggestions.