Yelp just turned your phone into a restaurant detective. The company's rolling out AI-powered menu scanning that overlays photos and reviews directly onto physical menus, plus a smarter voice assistant that remembers your preferences. It's the kind of practical AI that actually solves dinner decisions instead of just promising to.
Yelp is betting that the future of restaurant discovery isn't just about finding places - it's about understanding what you'll actually eat when you get there. The company's Tuesday rollout puts AI image recognition directly into diners' hands, letting them scan any physical menu and instantly see photos of dishes along with what other customers actually thought about them.
The menu scanning feature works through Yelp's mobile app camera. Point your phone at a restaurant menu, and overlay bubbles appear on screen over different dishes. Tap any bubble to see user-uploaded photos of that specific item plus relevant review snippets. It's the kind of practical AI application that makes you wonder why it took this long to exist.
This builds on Yelp's AI assistant launch from last year, but the scope is expanding rapidly. What started as a tool for connecting with services now covers restaurants, bars, local attractions, and retailers. The assistant pulls from business pages, websites, reviews, and photos to answer questions like what animals you might see at a specific zoo or whether a bar has outdoor seating.
The company's also making the AI assistant smarter about remembering your preferences. If you're always asking about pet-friendly restaurants or looking for specific types of haircuts, the system will start tailoring recommendations based on your history. Yelp is displaying pre-written questions on business pages based on frequently asked questions, so you don't have to type everything from scratch.
Search itself is getting more conversational too. Users can now type questions in everyday language directly into the search box, and the app supports these queries through voice search. It's Yelp's response to the rise of chat-style search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which have pushed established players like Google to add similar features to their search and Maps products.
