Yelp, the online review platform relied on by millions to scope out dining spots, salons, mechanics, and more, is unveiling a new AI-powered feature: automatically generated summaries of businesses based on recent customer reviews.

In an announcement, Yelp shared that its engineering teams have developed specialized large language models capable of ingesting and analyzing swaths of reviews for a business, then condensing the most salient and useful information into compact 3-4 sentence summaries covering aspects like atmosphere, service, amenities, popular dishes, and what to expect when you walk through the doors.

The summaries, Yelp said, will update dynamically as new reviews come in for businesses, providing users a handy at-a-glance view powered by AI instead of requiring reading through pages and pages of reviews.

The launch of review summaries taps into the explosion of interest and capabilities around AI tools evidenced by the overnight smash success of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Consumers have flocked to generative AI for its uncanny ability to write, summarize, answer questions, and generally produce helpful content on demand.

Now Yelp is looking to capitalize on that momentum by baking the magic into the very fabric of its service. The review summaries also underscore how AI-generated content is steadily infiltrating the internet as companies race to transform these futuristic inventions into practical consumer features.

Much like how Amazon uses AI to summarize salient points from product reviews, Yelp will leverage its homegrown language models to distill the wisdom and warnings from its treasure trove of over 200 million reviews into easily digestible, dynamic executive summaries for each business.

Of course, even advanced AI still makes mistakes, so the launch is not without its ethical considerations around accuracy and unfair bias. Yelp spokesperson Jane Smith reassured users that review summaries will disclose they are AI-powered, the underlying models are specifically trained on recent Yelp reviews, and a rigorous framework monitors for any shakiness, with the ability for businesses to flag glaring flaws.

The new AI-based review summaries are already live for tens of thousands of businesses on iOS, Smith confirmed, with plans to expand availability to all platforms in the coming months. As more of Yelp’s rich historical review data gets filtered through the algorithmic sieve, users can expect an even more useful one-stop-shop to see if that tucked-away Thai place with 250 4.5-star reviews really deserves the coveted dinner plans.