Yelp can now call restaurants for you to check their wait times

Yelp’s Check for Me voice agent, an AI system that can place calls, moves assistant-style calling into restaurant planning. During the last few weeks, personal assistants such as Instinct, Fo, and Muse let users call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Yelp is now adding the ability for app users to get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check wait times. The update matters because it connects discovery with action: users can learn whether a restaurant is likely to be busy before they commit to visiting.

Background: Voice Agents Move Into Restaurant Planning

Last year, Yelp introduced a voice solution for restaurants and service providers. That earlier step set up voice capability for businesses. The assistant tools made outbound calls feel routine to consumers. Yelp’s new step applies that pattern to a specific dining question: wait times.

Development: Check for Me Puts Calls On Demand

Check for Me will appear on restaurant pages in the Yelp app. It asks users to provide party size and phone number. After that, the AI agent places a call for the user, asks about wait times, and sends the answer by text so the user can choose whether to go to that particular restaurant.

This adds the consumer side to Yelp’s role as a discovery platform. One risk is that the user’s agent could reach the restaurant’s agent, and agent-to-agent communication might break down the conversation.

Latest Progress: OpenTable Booking, Memory, Lists, and Smart Lead Reply

Yelp is also updating the Yelp AI assistant users rely on to discover restaurants and services. A new OpenTable integration lets users book a restaurant without leaving the app. Personalization improves because the assistant remembers preferences mentioned in previous chats. The app now exposes chat history from the past 30 days, and full history is coming soon.

Users can ask the chatbot to create custom reminders, including weekend activity suggestions every Friday. The assistant also supports user-built lists, starting with two lists: “Been Here” and “Want to Go.” Lists can be filtered by location, category, and cuisine; users can reorder items, add notes, and share them.

Starting next month, Yelp will show weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings. Yelp is also converting collections into lists, giving the lists tab a new look, and adding a maps view; those changes are rolling out later in the year.

These consumer updates sit alongside Yelp’s effort to enhance customer support and business processes through AI. In the new update, Yelp is releasing Smart Lead Reply, a paid product that replies to customers and engages with them to qualify a lead. Business owners pay $30 per month for the service and can specify how an agent should handle a conversation with a customer. Meta is among other companies that have also been courting small businesses with AI offerings to handle inbound customer inquiries.

What to Watch Next: Agent Calls and Rolling Features

Yelp is currently spreading its AI work across consumer call automation, in-app discovery and booking, and paid business tools. Check for Me will show whether an AI agent can make a simple restaurant call reliable. The OpenTable integration, 30-day chat history, custom reminders, list filters, and weekly personalized recommendations extend the assistant step by step. The $30 per month Smart Lead Reply product places Yelp’s customer-support AI inside a paid business plan. The next signals are whether agent-to-agent calls remain usable, whether the later-in-year lists and maps view arrive on schedule, and whether full chat history appears soon.

Meta description:
Yelp adds Check for Me voice agent calls for restaurant wait times, OpenTable booking, 30-day chat history, and $30 Smart Lead Reply for businesses.

Tags: Yelp, Check for Me, AI voice agent, OpenTable, Smart Lead Reply

Featured image: abstract technology style with phone call waves and restaurant wait-time data, no real people, no company logos, no text.