Yext has announced a global integration with Amazon to give businesses control over the answers Alexa provides about them. With this new relationship, consumers using Alexa on an Amazon Echo or the like for voice search can receive the most up-to-date facts about businesses—locations, contact information, hours of operation and the like from businesses themselves.
As Yext says of the development:
Today is a quantum leap forward in Yext’s mission to give businesses control over their digital knowledge and provide consumers with perfect information everywhere. Amazon has changed the world with its innovative, market-leading voice-enabled devices, the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers, and the Alexa voice service. Now, the tens of millions of consumers who ask Alexa questions can get authoritative answers from the business itself with the Yext Knowledge Engine.
– Howard Lerman, founder and CEO, Yext.
Initially, Amazon Alexa will use Yext-powered digital knowledge to respond to queries about businesses around the globe including Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States with plans to expand to other countries in the future.
So how do you ensure that you can harness the service and ensure your information is correct on a device running Alexa? One option could be set-up a run through with a member of the team. But in general this is a good spur to get the basics right before using such a service (and potentially investing significant resources) to update your details on the key players such as Google.
