Text-a-Target

To assist guests in finding items in stores being remodeled, Target pulled out all the stops.

One initiative involved standing up an SMS-based store search, which allowed users without the Target application to find items in the store.

Inventory searches would query the Target API for a product in a store and get back an aisle / adjacent location.

We then took that aisle & recursively searched the store's map (conveniently served as an SVG) to determine where the aisle was located in the store (e.g., back-left).

The service ran for 8 months in 47 stores and sent/received over 500,000 messages.

Under the hood, user messages were first parsed with Natural to determine intent, and then entities were extracted using spaCy.