Expect Labs Raises More Funding for MindMeld App

San Francisco’s Expect Labs announced additional funding from cable giant Liberty Global and IDG Ventures.

While the company would not disclose the amount of the new money, it said it was more than its last round of seeding funding, which was $2.4 million. Tech media company IDG is reinvesting, and other investors include Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Telefonica Digital and others.

San Francisco’s Expect Labs is focused on anticipatory computing, and it has developed a product called MindMeld that analyzes speech in real time and returns search results based on verbal communication. The soon-to-be released free app combines Expect Labs’ voice-powered technology and the iPad’s videoconferencing capability, registering key words used during conversations among multiple people and GPS and search to deliver location-targeted and related results.

Expect Labs founder Tim Tuttle said that, for the past 20 years, artificial intelligence hasn’t been taken seriously, but he has recently seen steps toward it becoming a more viable and useful technology.

“We want to make it easy to share content and have everything organized on a timeline,” said Tuttle, who began his career working on artificial intelligence at MIT, and whose previous company, the Truveo video-search platform, was acquired by AOL. “From car companies to connected homes of the future to more intelligent meeting rooms — I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of AI.”

Apple’s Siri is an example of a helpful, smart companion that understands language and can provide the correct piece of information when you need it. MindMeld goes further than that, helping users remember names and understand what’s happening better than a human can, Tuttle said.

“Data sets are surprisingly intelligent and, in the last few years, computationally feasible,” Tuttle said.

Here’s a demo video: