Canada Now Has Its Own Restaurant Recommendation App: YP Dine

There's a new app on the market to help Canadians decided where to dine. According to a press release, digital media company Yellow Pages has launched a mobile app called YP Dine. Users can type their mood — "quick dinner," time like "friday evening," or an activity like "weekend brunch" — into the app to find a list of recommendations. The app allows users to search for restaurants nearby or by name and pulls up images of dishes and location information, too. YP Dine also integrates "playlists" or top picks by local chefs and restaurateurs, who share their favorite spots.

Yellow Pages integrated the functions of two companies it acquired in December — Bookenda and Dine.TO — into the app as well. This means users can "receive deals available at local restaurants, access and publish reviews, preview menus, and make reservations" through the app. In the future, Yellow Pages hopes to add an order- and pay-ahead feature to the app. Currently, YP Dine is only available in Montreal but will be expanding to Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary by June 1.

There are a number of restaurant recommendation apps currently on the market. Foursquare overhauled its app last summer and it now includes a "personalized local search feature" that makes restaurant recommendations based off of a series of "tastes" picked by the user. It also suggests experts and people to follow for restaurant recommendations. And just last month, a start-up in San Francisco revealed that it hopes to change the restaurant recommendation game with artificial intelligence. The app — called Luka — is a "cross between Yelp and Siri" and offers users a single recommendation per query instead of a list.