Amazon Expands Alexa's Brain With Yext Business Data Services

(Bloomberg) -You can now ask your Amazon Echo speaker, "Alexa, what time does Rite Aid close?" And get hours for the nearest pharmacy in your area.

Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top adds hours, addresses and phone numbers of over a million from companies to its Alexa digital assistant platform so that customers can access information by voice command. The Yellow Pages skill is the result of a new partnership with Yext Inc., which provides commercial data used in Google's Alphabet Inc. search engine, the Siri Digital Assistant (No.2 ) Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. social media platform.

The pairing announced this week is pushing the world's largest online retailer – already a starting point for more than half of all product searches – deeper into Google's information searches . The effort focuses on the material based on the user's location after they have entered an address into their Alexa application. No need to drop what you are doing and look for hours on your smartphone.

Amazon has provided similar information through the Yelp Consumer Review website since 2015, which has allowed users to ask, for example, "Alexa, what's the best Mexican restaurant nearby ? "Yext's data provides more material directly from companies such as McDonald's Corp., T-Mobile US Inc. and Rite Aid Corp., which pay Yext to keep their data up-to-date. different platforms. Yext data is also used on Yelp, which focuses more on customer reviews than on information provided directly by businesses.

Yext manages 30 million facts about 1.2 million businesses and sites, said CEO Howard Lerman. So, you can ask Alexa, "How many calories are in a Big Mac?" And get an answer. The most popular questions relate to store opening times, locations and phone numbers.

"Amazon should also be good at information," Lerman said. "It's a great strategic bridgehead for Amazon."