On Tuesday, Yelp announced the deployment of AI-powered "voice agents" designed to assist service providers and restaurants in managing phone calls, answering basic questions, and handling tasks such as adding customers to waitlists. According to Yelp, these voice agents do not require a complicated setup or API integrations. Instead, they leverage existing metadata and business-specific data, including pronunciation guides, customized voice greetings, and call forwarding rules. For instance, in a restaurant setting, Yelp's agents can integrate with the venue's management software to send reservation details directly to the customer after a call. The agents also manage features like automatic spam filtering and call analytics. For more complex requests, the AI hands the call over to a human representative. After each call, businesses receive a summary, transcript, and recording, providing valuable insights into customer interactions. "As small business owners often operate under challenging conditions and may not always be able to take calls, we aimed to develop a product that helps convert potential leads that might otherwise be missed," Yelp's Chief Product Officer, Craig Saldanha, explained in an interview with TechCrunch. Yelp employs OpenAI’s Realtime API to facilitate end-to-end calling, enhancing the agents' capabilities with the company’s extensive knowledge graph. This integration enables the AI to ask and respond to follow-up questions, ensuring a smoother and more natural conversation. The company is continually assessing new models to optimize performance, focusing on reducing latency, improving speech recognition accuracy, and enhancing the overall customer experience. Saldanha believes that, as voice technology becomes more standardized, the key differentiators will be the quality of underlying data and how effectively AI systems handle customer inquiries. In these critical areas, Saldanha asserts that Yelp holds a competitive advantage. With this innovative solution, Yelp aims to streamline communication for businesses while offering customers a seamless and efficient service. The introduction of AI voice agents represents a significant step forward in leveraging technology to support small service providers and restaurants, potentially increasing their operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.