Yelp creates its own AI video about restaurants

Yelp will use AI to stitch user-posted content to create short videos about businesses in the nightlife, food and restaurant industries. The company first started testing the AI stitched videos Last yearthey were available in the iOS app’s TikTok like vertically scrolling feed.

At the moment, business operators cannot see the videos created for users. Yelp users can’t opt out of their photos and videos being included in Yelp AI-stitched video. Yelp uses multiple generative AI tools for the final product. OpenAI LLMs create the text descriptions, narrator scripts, story topics, and proofread. ElevenLabs generates the voice of the narrator, and Amazon Transcribe creates synchronized captions. You can see what they are like in this video shared by Yelp. The vertical video combines videos and images, with an AI-generated narration and AI-generated captions, to discuss things like the food, cocktails, or ambiance of a restaurant. Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s CPO, told the Verge that Yelp would like to make “as much video as possible”. But they will only do so if there are enough reviews, photos and videos for a restaurant to tell an interesting story. Yelp uses personalized signals to decide when to show you videos. Saldanha says that the videos are not personalized even though they eventually refresh. There is only one AI-stitched business video live at any given time. Saldanha says that if a user or business feels an AI-stitched videos is inaccurate or offensive they can report it. They do this by tapping on the three dots at the top right corner. Yelp also performs periodic audits at scale.