Jersey Strong

Over the last few weeks we've focused on pro bono initiatives to help organizations navigate the growing COVID-19 global health crisis. On March 12th we announced free access to our Answers product to help businesses communicate important coronavirus-related updates to their customers, and today we're happy to announce a new collaboration with the State of New Jersey Office of Innovation to provide New Jersey residents a new online portal for comprehensive COVID-19 information.

The website, covid19.nj.gov, uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the questions people ask about the coronavirus, then delivers direct, contextual answers using data collected from multiple New Jersey state agencies, federal resources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Federation of American Scientists "Ask a Scientist" interactive tool.

To stay responsive to the public's concerns amid this rapidly evolving pandemic, the New Jersey Office of Innovation can monitor search data on this new website to track new queries coming in, then iterate on the content to ensure people receive accurate, up-to-date answers to their questions.

New Jersey residents are also looking for information across a range of online platforms and apps, and Yext's integrations ensure they can find authoritative COVID-19 information regardless of where they look — on the dedicated NJ.gov COVID-19 website, as well as on third-party search engines like Google and Bing, and other digital platforms like Alexa, Siri, Apple Maps, Uber, Lyft Waze, and Facebook.

This project was initiated and launched in five days thanks to the hard work and dedication of the New Jersey Office of Innovation. We were able to help them quickly because we leveraged Yext's existing technology — the Yext Knowledge Graph powers the experience, and our products, Answers and Pages, have been configured specifically for the New Jersey government coronavirus response.

In a global pandemic, getting the right information out quickly can help save lives, and Yext is committed to doing our small part. To that end, we'd be willing to help other government agencies manage their COVID-19 response. We have developers on-hand to offer pro bono assistance to any other local, state or federal government agencies who are looking to quickly enable something similar to the State of New Jersey. You can contact us at covid-gov-response@yext.com — we're here to help.