Expect Labs Puts Shopping on Steroids with a New Solution for Building Voice-Powered Product Discovery Applications

SAN FRANCISCO - August 27, 2014 - Consumers are increasingly relying on their mobile devices to comparison shop in-store. Today’s smartest shoppers routinely consult mobile shopping apps and websites to find product information and track down the best price before making a purchase.

In a world with large product catalogs and small smartphone screens, however, navigating to the right product can often be a cumbersome task — especially while scouring the aisles. Even with the best mobile shopping apps, the smart shopper must often drop their shopping bags to tap through numerous menus or type a search with two hands. For any serious shopper on a mission, this dystopian reality is entirely insufferable.

Avid fans of science fiction already know the solution to this problem: spoken voice commands can provide a much more efficient way for shoppers to quickly find product information when on-the-go. While the technical capabilities to make this possible have finally arrived, developers eager to create these new voice-driven experiences still face formidable challenges.

Building a system to accurately understand spoken natural language and immediately unearth the most relevant product from potentially millions of options is no small task. It involves integrating and optimizing some of the most advanced machine learning and search technology that exists today — placing it out of reach for all but the most sophisticated technology companies.

Today, all that changes. Expect Labs is injecting steroids into the smart shopper experience with a new turnkey solution for building voice-powered applications using the MindMeld API. Now any developer can create a voice-driven shopping experience for their app or website in two simple steps:

Point MindMeld to your product catalog and automatically generate a
custom knowledge graph.
Use the MindMeld client SDKs to display a customizable voice-driven interface
for your eCommerce app or website.

Try out some examples here: https://developer.expectlabs.com/demos/smartShopper

"Just a few weeks ago, I found myself huddled in the corner of Best Buy with my smartphone, pinching and zooming through numerous mobile websites trying to find the best price on a new flat screen TV," says Tim Tuttle, CEO and founder of Expect Labs. "I gave up after a few minutes and ended up overpaying — if only I had MindMeld’s intelligent voice capabilities, I could have quickly found the best price and saved an arm and a leg."

With MindMeld, this type of comparison shopping nightmare is finally a thing of the past. Developers can now use MindMeld to easily build elegant voice interfaces that deliver fast voice searching and a truly frictionless mobile shopping experience.

About Expect Labs

Expect Labs provides a cloud-based service called MindMeld that enables companies to build intelligent voice interfaces for any application or device. Hundreds of companies use this service to power next-generation, voice-driven experiences that enable users to quickly find and navigate information in a range of applications. Expect Labs has been widely recognized as a leader in the field of anticipatory computing and was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s “50 Smartest Companies” of 2014.

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