Capabilities & How It Works

Capabilities & How It Works

Nobi combines multiple capabilities into a single AI assistant that helps your site visitors find products, get answers, and complete their shopping journey faster.

Core Capabilities

Semantic search

Traditional keyword search only finds exact matches. If a customer searches for "shoes for running," they won't find products tagged as "athletic footwear" or "jogging sneakers."
Nobi understands meaning and context. When someone searches for "something to wear to a beach wedding" or "gifts for coffee lovers," Nobi interprets the intent and returns relevant products, even if those exact words don't appear in your product descriptions.
This also allows us to always show results. When shoppers see a page with no results, they can get discouraged and bounce, but seeing something, even if it’s not a perfect match, can lead them to continue browsing and eventually checkout, or complete your conversion action.
Nobi always shows results for simple searches, preventing your site’s visitors from hitting “dead ends”
Nobi always shows results for simple searches, preventing your site’s visitors from hitting “dead ends”

Conversational assistance

Nobi acts like a knowledgeable site assistant, and for ecommerce stores, a sales assistant, answering questions about your business or your products through natural conversation. Customers can ask:
  • "What's the difference between these two jackets?"
  • "Do you have this in a size small?"
  • "Is this machine washable?"
  • "Where’s the closest store to my place in Richmond?"
Nobi provides accurate answers based on your product data and site content, helping customers feel confident in their purchase decisions.

Ecommerce

While Nobi can work across many different types of sites that have a “conversion” event, it has several features that are particularly helpful in DTC ecommerce:
🔍 Product Discovery
Beyond answering direct questions, Nobi helps ecommerce customers discover products they might not have found otherwise. It can:
  • Suggest complementary items ("What goes with this?")
  • Recommend alternatives when something is out of stock
  • Surface products based on use cases rather than categories
  • Help customers navigate large catalogs without feeling overwhelmed
📦 Merchandising
While Nobi uses AI to understand customer intent, you maintain complete control over what products appear in results. Use the merchandising dashboard to:
  • Boost products you want to promote
  • Bury products you want to de-emphasize
  • Pin products to specific positions in results
  • Hide products from search entirely
Learn more in the Merchandising Overview.

How It Works Behind the Scenes

1. Ingest and index

When you install Nobi, we import your product catalog, and optionally, your site content and any other information (like merchandising docs or custom instructions) and build a semantic understanding of your inventory. This process:
  • Analyzes product titles, descriptions, attributes, and metadata
  • Creates semantic vectors that capture meaning and relationships
  • Indexes product availability, variants, and pricing
  • Continuously syncs to stay up to date with your catalog changes

2. Understand intent

When a customer interacts with Nobi, we analyze their input to understand what they actually want:
  • Parse natural language queries for meaning, not just keywords
  • Identify product attributes they care about (color, size, style, use case)
  • Recognize follow-up questions in conversational context
  • Determine whether they want products, information, or both

3. Take action (i.e. search your catalog)

Based on your customer’s query, Nobi decides the best action(s) to take to get them what they need. For example, if you’re using Nobi in Search Mode, Nobi’s assistant will find relevant products and information using hybrid ranking that combines:
  • Semantic similarity - How well products match the customer's intent
  • Product attributes - Availability, variants, price, ratings
  • Your merchandising rules - Boosts, buries, pins, and hides you've configured
  • Behavioral signals - What similar customers found helpful
This ensures customers see the most relevant results while respecting your business priorities.

4. Respond and track

Nobi’s response appears in the chat modal, optionally with product images, prices, and key details. Customers can:
  • Click through to product pages
  • Add items directly to cart
  • Ask follow-up questions
  • Continue browsing
Nobi tracks all interactions (views, clicks, add-to-carts, purchases) so you can measure performance and understand how customers use the assistant. Learn more in Reporting & Analytics.
 

Next Steps

Ready to install? Follow our Getting Started Checklist
Want to see use cases? Check out Implementation examples
Questions about features? Visit our FAQ