• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 15, 2020

Algolia AI, a suite of search tools for websites and apps, launched Wednesday, packaged in an API.

The goal is to eliminate the challenges of implementing a custom search experience for all types of businesses that require consumers to go to their website to look for information or make a purchase. 

The product suite from Algolia offers features that range from semantic processing to gaining real-world understanding, to detecting the actions that consumers want to take based on their queries, explains Ashley Stirrup, Algolia CMO.

"We were using AI previously for natural-language processing and personalization, but the new products include features around synonym detection and self-learning reranking of products on the website," he said. 

If an item keeps getting clicked on in a specific search result, the tool recommends that the retailer bump up the listing on the search results page. 

While Dynamic Synonym Suggestions aims to improve the user experience by analyzing search patterns and recommending new synonyms that deliver the most relevant results, Dynamic Re-Ranking analyzes consumer actions on websites and mobile apps to boost the highest performing results for each query.

The technology learns from the searches across Algolia's network of clients such as Lacoste. With about 9,500 customers, the company is on a run-rate to power more than 1.25 trillion searches within the next year. 

Algolia Answers, a semantic search option, combines AI-driven natural-language and real-world understanding to return answers to queries.

Built on top of technology from Algolia and OpenAI, this feature addresses the most difficult natural-language questions, finding not just an answer, but the answer that best responds to the searcher’s question.

Yext Answers is similar, but Stirrup says there are significant differences.

Algolia's search technology can find nuanced answers to questions like "I'm looking for a Tom Hanks comedy movie that cost less than $5 and is rated greater than seven stars," he said. It will understand that Tom Hanks is the actor, that the movie will cost less than $5 and has a rating of more than seven stars.

Algolia Understand, which was developed to identify what the user wants to do, understands the user’s intent and then goes further by understanding the key items within the query.

The technology also detects the actions consumers want to take and the items they seek through human-like Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Through advanced understanding of numbers and named entities, consumers can move from search to conversion without needing to refine or update search requests. 

Personalization, which uses AI to analyze individual consumers’ actions to build dynamic user profiles, personalizes and activates, allowing profiles to deliver a unique digital experience tailored to each consumer whether they search or browse, based on previous interactions with the website such as purchases, additions to carts and wish lists, and page and video views.