SAN FRANCISCO, July 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Algolia, the leading Search and Discovery solution, today announced cutting-edge updates to its search-as-a-service offering with new personalization, voice and mobile capabilities. The latest release enables organizations to create a fast, extremely relevant and personalized search experience that can be custom-tailored to different desktop, mobile and voice user interfaces and needs. With more than 7,500 customers conducting over 60 billion searches each month on Algolia, the Summer ‘19 release allows customers to deliver amazing search and discovery experiences to consumers worldwide in over 70 languages.

Consumers today want instant, frictionless experiences offered by the likes of Google, Amazon and Netflix, when searching for information, products and media content. They also demand experiences that deliver exactly what they are looking for — regardless of the digital interface or the language. These moments of interaction — the “Now Moments” — are critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty. That is why Google, Amazon and Netflix have such a dominant market share across web search, U.S. e-Commerce and paid streaming, on-demand content, respectively. This underscores why there is such an enormous difference between a good user experience and a great user experience.

According to Gartner¹, by 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.

“At Algolia, it is our mission to allow any company, large or small, to deliver an amazing search and discovery experience,” said Nicolas Dessiagne, co-founder and CEO of Algolia. “Algolia Summer ‘19 is another important step forward in that mission, with important innovations in personalization, voice and mobile search experiences. Our search-as-a-service platform is giving companies of all sizes the best of both worlds with a pre-packaged search and delivery platform that they can quickly and cost effectively customize to their very specific business and user needs. No other solution in the world provides customers with a great, pre-built user experience, incredible flexibility and control, with the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership.”

Algolia Summer ‘19 includes a number of new capabilities and key enhancements:

Personalization
Algolia Personalization allows business users to collect key information, such as click data, add-to-cart and purchase data, and then build rules so that they can use this customer preference data to tailor search results across mobile, desktop and voice user experiences. Several important personalization enhancements include:

• A new personalization simulator tool provides non-technical users greater control in weighting the personalization attributes and then visualizes how the configuration changes the search results and impacts the end user experience in real time.
• Front-end and back-end integration with other personalization solutions — including Dynamic Yield's AI-powered Personalization Anywhere™ platform, Target2Sell's AI Platform for 1to1 Commerce, and Raptor's Smart Advisor — allows companies to build a single personalization experience across search, browse and email experiences.
• A new User Profile API enables customers to leverage Algolia-generated user profiles in third party solutions.

Voice Search
The latest additions to Algolia for Voice Search allow developers to combine textual relevance, personalization, and speed on voice-first and mobile platforms. These features create more flexibility in responding to user requests with the most relevant results and include:

• Increased flexibility on entity matching allows developers to now account for the differences in the ways people speak or misspeak to deliver more accurate search results. Developers can now match entities on synonyms, plurals, or misspellings.
• New pre-built JavaScript Speech-to-Text integrations allow developers to embed voice input within their mobile websites in minutes.

Mobile Search
In order to allow developers to quickly build great mobile search user experiences, Algolia offers pre-built, InstantSearch, UI libraries that developers can embed into their mobile websites or apps. Significant upgrades to these libraries include:

• Developers now have far more flexibility to control both the user experience and the appearance and branding of their search user interface. The upgraded libraries also allow developers to build more advanced experiences including menu systems and faceting and filtering.
• Developers are able to work with Algolia’s search API in 14 different development environments. This release includes a new Kotlin API client, providing another option for developing mobile experiences.

Speed
Fast, responsive user experiences are critical to customer satisfaction. In fact, Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of latency cost the company 1% of sales. Speed has always been one of Algolia’s top priorities with customers typically seeing response times of 20-50 milliseconds.

• Algolia has accelerated searches that use faceting and filtering by up to 30%.
• Algolia has also reduced the time to index data by up to 10% for complex search use cases, allowing marketplaces and media companies to shorten the time between new content publication and that content appearing in search results.

"People don’t search for products the same way by voice as they do on websites," said Jochen Emig, founder of ONSEI, a voice application development agency. “The really good thing is that the leap to using a full search engine in voice is not as big as we originally estimated. With a search engine such as Algolia, it just makes sense."

“Implementing an intelligent search with Algolia was super fast and easy with their great tools. We could add voice search to our app in 5 minutes,” said Dennis Kugelmann, developer at TheSimpleClub.

To learn more about today’s announcement, register for one of the Algolia Summer ‘19 webinars at https://www.algolia.com/webinar/summer-19.

Helpful Links

• Blog: https://blog.algolia.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/algolia
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/algolia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/algolia/
• Careers: https://www.algolia.com/careers

About Algolia
Our mission is to allow any company, large or small, to deliver an amazing search and discovery experience. Algolia helps the most innovative companies across all industries create powerful, relevant and scalable discovery experiences for their users. Unlike other solutions, Algolia's search-as-a-service platform reduces the complexities of building and scaling a fast, tailored and personalized digital experience and helps teams accelerate development time. More than 7,500 companies including Twitch, Quicksilver, Discovery Communications, Medium, WeWork, Zendesk and Stripe rely on Algolia to manage 60 billion search queries a month. Algolia is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, Tokyo, New York and Atlanta. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com.

Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Offleash for Algolia
algolia@offleashpr.com

¹ Smarter with Gartner, “Gartner Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond”, Contributor: Kasey Panetta, October 3, 2017, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-strategic-predictions-for-2018-and-beyond/