Yelp is creating its own AI videos about restaurants

Yelp is going to use AI to stitch together user-posted content about restaurants, food, and nightlife businesses to make short videos about those businesses. The company initially started testing the AI-stitched videos last year, but they’re now available nationwide on the iOS app’s TikTok-like vertically scrolling home feed.

Business operators can’t currently preview the generated videos or get an update when one is created, and Yelp users also can’t currently opt out of having their photos or videos show up in Yelp’s AI-stitched videos. Yelp relies on multiple generative AI tools to create the finished product, as OpenAI LLMs write the text descriptions and narrator’s script, put together story topics, and proofread, while ElevenLabs is used to generate the narrator’s voice and Amazon Transcribe creates the synchronized on-screen captions.

You can get an idea of what they’re like in the below video shared by Yelp. The vertical video blends together videos and images with an AI-generated voiceover and AI-generated captions to talk about things like the restaurant’s food, cocktails, and ambiance.

Yelp wants to make “as many videos as possible,” Yelp CPO Craig Saldanha tells The Verge, but will only make them if a restaurant has enough reviews, photos, and videos to tell a compelling story. Yelp relies on personalized signals to determine when to actually show the videos to you. The videos themselves are not personalized, even though they are eventually refreshed — there is only one active AI-stitched video about a single business live at a time, according to Saldanha. If a user or a business feels that an AI-stitched video is inaccurate or offensive, Saldanha says they can report it by tapping the three dots in the top right corner of the video. Yelp does periodic audits “at scale” as well.

Update, July 30th: Clarified that business operators can’t currently preview the videos and aren’t notified about them.