Welcome to Miso!

What is Miso?

Miso is a real-time personalization data platform that empowers marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, and content media sites to deliver immersive, contextual, and tailored experiences, and do it at the scale of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of catalog items. This means any product team can rapidly build real-time personalization into their search, recommendation, email marketing, and more, at the level of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, eBay and Spotify—without needing the infrastructure, machine learning PhDs, and big data on which those companies have a monopoly.

Miso is unlike traditional, static personalization systems: 

• Miso constructs a 1:1 personalization model for each and every user on your site, rather than aggregating personas and audiences.
• Miso operates in real-time. At cold-start, Miso can quickly personalize for new and anonymous users in just a few clicks, without needing to wait for a model refresh.
• Miso doesn’t use 3rd party cookies or pixels. It relies solely on first party data — data that most organizations already collect.
• MIso is a unified platform, so you can personalize entire user journeys with the same data and intelligence end-to-end, across all your platforms.

What is real-time personalization?

Real-time personalization is:

• Providing a unique, behavioral-intent based experience for each and every user that is driven by their real-time, in-session, clickstream logs and constantly updated to ensure your users can find exactly what they're looking for and recommend products they wouldn’t have discovered on their own. 
• Semantically understanding both explicit and latent features in your product catalog and expertly matching them to users based on their likelihood of converting.
• Having the capability to show entirely different site layouts for each user and change how content and products are presented

Real-time personalization is not:

• Presenting things to the user that they've told you to remember (like saving their home airport on a travel app)
• "Customizing" the UI to display the user's name
• Notifications and alerts based on user-generated information (like letting them know when their order has shipped)
• A search query that returns the same results to an entire group/cohort of users
• A recommendation based on rules, like always suggesting a "buy together" offer if the user has a certain item in their cart

Most importantly, at Miso, we strongly believe that real-time personalization should not and in fact need not be:

• Tracking and surveilling your users around the web
• Buying third-party data
• Cross-mining your customers' data

How does personalization work with Miso?

Miso trains real-time personalization models at the level of each individual user or visitor, based on the product and interaction data you upload and stream directly from your site. Miso's real-time models can triangulate what a user is interested in after just a few clicks, even at cold-start. User data is completely optional—Miso supports anonymous personalization using just your session IDs.

Miso is based on the founders’ NSF and MacArthur-funded research on privacy-centric small data personalization with Professor Deborah Estrin at CornellTech. The breakthrough idea: Instead of the traditional personalization approach of mining user data to do “collaborative filtering,” Miso instead analyzes your product data first. We do so with pre-trained neural networks that can understand natural language content and context at a deep semantic level.

Then, with this core baseline of catalog comprehension, Miso also pays attention to every clickstream interaction on your site and understands how it fits into your conversion funnel (whether it leads to the user becoming more engaged, or dropping off).

With Miso Recipes, you can use APIs to build practically any kind of personalized experience, from search to product recommendations to category pages. Because Miso is a unified platform, as you add layer in more search and discovery integrations, all of these components work together. For instance, as a user searches and filters on your SERP, Miso’s recommendation engines are paying attention to prepare optimized product recommendations for the context and intent cues your user is expressing on the SERP. In other words, more integrations make Miso better overall—our customers typically see an immediate increase of 50–200% on their conversions with steady growth over time as they build out additional recipes.

Next: Importing Data into Miso