Yext Grows a Brain to power Web site AI
Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) developer Yext, Inc. has announced the launch of Yext Brain.
The company describes it as a way to allow businesses to create and relate all the facts about themselves in an AI-ready data structure, so they can power their own sites and services and sync with artificial intelligence-enabled consumer services, like search, voice assistants, and chatbots. With Yext Brain, it says businesses can control the facts about them with greater precision and depth than ever before.
"A website is dumb! It can't answer questions. If you want to find something, even if you already know the site contains your answer, you have to guess what page it's on and read the entire thing until you find it. Today with the launch of Brain, Think, and AI-ready Pages, Yext unveils its vision for three revolutionary new DKM technologies that think for you. No more guessing, no more reading, no more thinking," said Howard Lerman , Yext founder & CEO. "
A website makes you do the thinking. A Brain thinks for you."
With Yext Brain, businesses can create digital entities like Events, Locations, Professionals, Products, Limited Time Offers, and more. They can build two-way relationships among entities inside Yext Brain, which help AI-powered services answer detailed questions like which store is hosting an event or which doctor takes which insurance.
Yext Think is an answers engine that can power experiences on a brand's own website — like store locators, menu search, or doctor finders — with direct answers from Yext Brain. This allows a user to ask a business's website things like What time does the Union Square location close? ; I need a dentist nearby who takes my insurance and has appointments available today ; or How many calories are in the bacon cheeseburger? Yext Think makes a business website intelligent, so it can understand a user query and return a smart, direct answer from Yext Brain.
Two new features have been added to Yext Pages: Businesses can create an AI-ready page on their websites for any entity stored in Yext Brain with the click of a button. And with a new library of transactional modules, they can easily include pre-built page modules for appointment booking, ticketing, and more. This means that anything stored in Yext Brain can become its own smart landing page for consumer discovery and action, whether it's a location, event, or a professional's profile.
"Yext Brain allows any business to create digital entities like locations, events, people, and products, and connect them like synapses in a brain," said Marc Ferrentino , Chief Strategy Officer of Yext. "The result is extraordinary. Any business can structure its data to power direct answers to complex consumer questions on its own website or third party services like Google, Alexa, Siri, and more."