Abstract: A facility is described for providing contextual information automatically. In various embodiments, the facility receives an indication to start a conversation, automatically determines an identification for an item indicated by the indication, encodes the identification in a message, and sends the message so that a recipient of the message can locate the item. The facility can include a responder component and an initiator component. The initiator component can receive an identification for contextual information and an identification of the responder, initiate a conversation with the responder's computing device, and automatically encode the received indication of the contextual information in a message that it sends to the responder component so that the responder component can cause a link to the contextual information to be provided that, when selected, causes an application executing on the responder's computing device to load the contextual information.