Introduction | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

Yext Chat is a conversational assistant that uses large language models like GPT-3 to answer users’ questions and fulfill their requests. Commonly Yext Chat is used in conjunction with Yext Search to answer questions by looking up information from the Yext Knowledge Graph. Yext Chat can also be used to perform other tasks like scheduling appointments, placing orders, or collecting leads.

These capabilities make Yext Chat applicable to a wide variety of use cases:

• Marketing: You can set up Yext Chat on your website to answer users’ questions about your products, nudge them toward a purchase, or collect leads.
• Support: You can use Yext Chat within your support portal or ticketing platform to help users get answers to their questions before they become support tickets.
• Workplace: You can set up Yext Chat within your intranet or your Slack workplace to help your employees find the information they need to do their jobs.
• Commerce: You can use Yext Chat as a shopping assistant on your commerce site or app to help users find products they’ll like as well as check on order status and other tasks.

Core Concepts and Key Terminology

Bots

In your Yext Account, you can set up as many bots as you want. Each bot has a unique ID and a unique configuration. For example, you might have one chatbot for your marketing site and another for your support site. Configuration from one bot does not affect the other bots in your account.

Each bot has some basic configuration including:

• A unique id, which is used in API requests
• A name, which is only for display purposes
• An identityContext for giving the bot additional instructions and background information

Goals

Goals are the fundamental building block of each chatbot. A goal describes something that chatbot can do, such as:

• Answering questions from the Yext Knowledge Graph
• Scheduling an appointment
• Checking on an order status
• Collecting leads

Instructions

Goals work by giving the bot instructions on how to carry out the task at hand. You write instructions to the bot the same way you would to a person - in written language, as a numbered list.

Each instruction in the list has a type that designates which action to perform. This includes: collecting information, searching for information in the Yext Knowledge Graph, answering questions, sending an API request, executing a function, and replying to a user.

This guide will walk you through the steps to create a bot, and the relevant goals and instructions.