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. In various embodiments, the facility receives a message containing an indication of contextual information, decodes the indication to determine an identifier for the contextual information, and provides a command for loading the contextual information.