Yext Offers Local Businesses A Smart Inbox For Phone Calls | Hacker News Reader

Yext Offers Local Businesses A Smart Inbox For Phone Calls

techcrunch.com

16 pointsauston16 comments

"Ultimately the analysis of the phone calls helps Yext make their flagship product, the local business search engine which they claim gets visited by over a million users a month, more detailed for visitors and at the same time more effective for listed companies."

Why does Compete.com say ~70k visitors a month (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yext.com/) and QuantCast says 55.8k visitors a month (http://www.quantcast.com/yext.com)?

they do other sites too, like gymticket.com. maybe someone could do a reverse domain lookup on their ip

I couldn't understand what they were doing during the presentation, but the founders explained afterward and it seems pretty impressive.

At first I thought the point in the Q&A where the Yext front man said "Yeah, I just told you" to PG reflected poor manners.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2163590 - 13:15

Then I went back and I realized that PG was repeatedly probing to figure out which part of this guy's business was most important to him, and he wasn't going for it.

Smart guy.

Yext does seem pretty useful for a small business that is getting a lot of calls and perhaps doesn't have a person able to triage the calls. Perhaps they will win, though I'm not convinced. They seem to have setup a big hurdle they'll have to get over that we in the tech-web bubble like to forget; namely that not everyone in the world is so web and computer focused, especially in the market they are after. In fact I believe the Yext presenter stated himself that the businesses they talked to preferred receiving phone calls when obtaining business. So maybe their solution will work for many businesses, or maybe the speech => text won't be good enough and it will be another annoyance that a pen and pad of paper can solve just as well.

Why do you think it will win?

An aside about tc50 in general:

I feel like a lot of the products I saw today were taking shots in the dark, and trying to solve problems they felt the need to convince the audience existed. I didn't feel that there was a lot of innovation or the sensation that the software / products demoed would really make my life or others lives better. It felt more like the presenters were taking problems that have already been solved outside of the web and trying to bridge the gap between the current solutions and online solutions. That's not to say doing so they won't be successful, but it did leave me feeling constantly disappointed, like I was being sold a bill of goods while having someone yelling at me about how my life will be so much better by using their service. I should add 1) I didn't watch every presentation and 2) I think I've been having a bad day so maybe it's just rubbing off on watching the demos.

(Not to put anyone down) I agree with you about the demos, except Yext.

I believe they hold promise - outside of their core "local search" business, if they port some additional/basic features of crm's into their app I believe they would be head & shoulders above pretty much everyone doing crm/contact management.

"maybe the speech => text won't be good enough and it will be another annoyance that a pen and pad of paper can solve just as well."

Does it matter, they already have 20 million in revenue without the text to speech bit. Nothing says the businesses have to use that inbox thing they could very well just use pen and paper and ignore their inbox altogether.

Yext looks great, but you do realize there are about 24 companies which will be presenting tomorrow, right?

Most definitely. So far, they've enamored me.

The original TC headline ("TC50: Yext Offers Local Businesses A Smart Inbox For Phone Calls") was more informative than the submitter's personal opinion about a tradeshow prize ("I think Yext will/should win TechCrunch 50").

Hate to rain on the parade but I don't see this going anywhere unless they use humans to transcribe the phone calls which presents privacy issues. Speech rec simply isn't there yet.

You're probably right, but I don't want anyone to think that speech recognition isn't good now, it just isn't good generally. There are plenty of doctors who expect programs like dragon to replace expensive transcriptionists.

Are you sure about that? Google voice's speech recognition is apparently very impressive.

That couldn't be farther from my experience - for me, the automated transcriptions are impressive in speed alone. They're usually so far off as to only give a vague impression (often wrong) of what they called about.

It's good as a constantly fresh source of amusement, I suppose. :-)

I guess I can't be 100% certain so no. However Google is another story. They've got mega resources.

I'm under the impression that it's not pure speech recognition, but speech recognition within a specific category. The lexicon is dramatically reduced.

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