Expect Labs' voice-powered smarts heads to online shopping

If you’ve ever wanted to search a shopping site or app with your voice, Expect Labs may have just the thing for you.

The startup, which has developed a predictive voice-powered API dubbed “MindMeld,” announced today that its technology now supports online shopping sites and apps. Once implemented, it lets you search for products with your voice using everyday language — for example, “Do you have any red sweaters?” — which could make comparison shopping both in-store and online a lot easier.

After performing a few voice searches with a demo of MindMeld’s shopping search, I found it to be accurate and fast. It feels like Siri or Google Now, except entirely for shopping. But of course, the real test will be seeing how it works on a live shopping site.

Tim Tuttle, Expect Labs’ founder and CEO, says it’s also easy to implement the MindMeld tech in a shopping site or app. You just need to point its crawling manager to your product catalog and then plug in MindMeld’s search in your app or website. Tuttle says MindMeld will be able to quickly index any shopping site that’s optimize for SEO or Facebook’s Open Graph.

When it comes to in-store comparisons, it may still be easier to use a barcode scanning app like Red Lazer for price comparisons. But Tuttle doesn’t see much competition there.

“I think it complements barcode scanning,” he said. “In a lot of cases it might be faster to open the app and speak a product name … it’s really all about what is the fastest way to get the consumer to think about the product.”

Tuttle says there are now more than 800 companies using the MindMeld API to build apps “large and small.” The API currently supports iPhone and Android apps as well as desktop and mobile websites.

The shopping update comes a month after Expect Labs opened up its API to connected devices, and it’s another sign of how versatile the company’s predictive technology can be. Its tech specializes in natural language queries across large sets of data, which also allows it to dig up information without you directly asking for it. Expect Labs first showed off MindMeld’s capabilities as a group video chat app, but now it’s focusing on building out an API that developers can take advantage of.

The San Francisco-based company has raised around $2.4 million from Google Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Intel Capital, Liberty Global Ventures, and others.