Yelp can now call on your behalf to check wait times at a restaurant
I keep circling back to the image of a machine making a phone call. Yelp's AI now dials a host, asks about the wait, maybe gets put on hold, and then reports back like a friend who owes you a favor. That crosses a threshold without ceremony. We already let algorithms choose our music and our routes, but voice calls were the last human-only channel. Now even that's up for grabs.
What draws me in is the social texture of it. When a real person calls, there's tone, politeness, the unspoken dance of "I know you're busy." A bot has none of that, yet restaurants will likely adapt, maybe even prefer it. I'd want to know how hosts react when they realize they're talking to software. Do they get shorter? More helpful? The data on that could tell us something about how much of service is performance.
The recommendation memory part is less surprising, but it's the glue. Once Yelp knows you hate cilantro and always order the spicy noodles, the wait-time call becomes just one node in a web of predictions. I'm not sure I want a company that deeply, that quietly, but I also can't pretend I'm not curious where it leads.