How Yelp Is Using Your Food Photos and Artificial Intelligence to Recommend Restaurants

Behind the scenes, Yelp is improving its restaurant listings using your food porn pictures. That photo you took of you eating soft serve at your local ice cream shop? From that photo alone, the AI can determine whether the ice cream shop has outdoor seating, the ambience, and whether it's for couples of families. The AI will eventually be able to identify dishes in the photos by analyzing the color, texture, and shapes of the images. The result is photos and restaurant profiles that will be auto-captioned with phrases like, "good for kids, casual and loud atmosphere," with a percentile accuracy rating.