Yelp's Check for Me sends an AI voice agent to call restaurants about wait times

Yelp is rolling out an AI voice agent that will phone restaurants on a user's behalf to ask about wait times, according to TechCrunch. The feature, called Check for Me, appears on restaurant pages in the Yelp app and turns a routine chore — calling a busy host stand — into an automated task.

How Check for Me works

Users open a restaurant's page, enter their party size and phone number, and the AI agent places the call for them, TechCrunch reports. Once it has the answer, the agent texts the wait time back so the user can decide whether to head to that restaurant or pick somewhere else.

Yelp already sits on the other side of this equation: last year it launched a voice solution aimed at restaurants and service providers. Check for Me adds the consumer half, and TechCrunch points out a wrinkle that comes with it — with agents on both ends, a user's AI might end up talking to a restaurant's AI, and that agent-to-agent exchange could break down.

The launch lands amid a wave of similar tools. As TechCrunch notes, assistants like Instinct, Fo and Muse have in recent weeks given users the ability to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking.

A wider AI refresh for the app

Check for Me arrives as part of a broader update to Yelp's AI assistant, which helps users discover restaurants and services. An OpenTable integration now lets users complete a booking entirely inside the app, according to TechCrunch.

The assistant is also getting memory. It will recall preferences users mentioned in earlier chats, and users can browse their chat history from the past 30 days, with the full archive due soon. Users can ask the chatbot to set custom reminders — for example, a Friday digest of weekend activity ideas.

Yelp is adding user-built lists as well, starting with two defaults, "Been Here" and "Want toGo". Lists can be filtered by location, category and cuisine, reordered, annotated with notes and shared with other people. Starting next month, Yelp will surface weekly personalized recommendations based on saved items and rankings, and later this year it plans to convert existing collections into lists, redesign the lists tab and add a maps view.

A paid AI product for businesses

On the business side, Yelp is releasing Smart Lead Reply, a paid product that responds to inbound customer messages and works to qualify leads. Business owners pay $30 per month and can define how the agent should steer a conversation, TechCrunch reports. Yelp sees the tool as part of a broader push to apply AI to customer support and business workflows, and TechCrunch notes that Meta has likewise been pitching AI tools to small businesses for handling inbound inquiries.

Why it matters

Checking a wait time is a narrow task, but it is one millions of people already do by phone, and Yelp is now automating it inside a mainstream consumer app rather than a developer demo. That marks voice agents' arrival in everyday use and previews a period where AI calling a business on a person's behalf is simply normal behavior.

It also creates an unusual failure mode: agents calling agents. Yelp itself acknowledges that agent-to-agent conversations might break down, according to TechCrunch, and as consumers and businesses both deploy voice AI, the industry will need conventions for machine-to-machine calls that neither side fumbles.

For Yelp, the update strengthens its AI position on both sides of its marketplace. Consumers get an assistant that acts rather than only recommends, while the $30-per-month Smart Lead Reply points to a fresh revenue stream: selling AI labor to the small businesses listed on the platform.