Voice is revolutionising the search industry. Emarketer forecasts that almost 40 million Americans will use a voice-activated device such as Amazon Echo or Google Home this year. Addstructure wants to help retailers make the most of this opportunity.

The company offers a white-labelled natural language understanding (NLU) platform. Its service ranges from review summarisation (thousands of reviews into pros and cons) to complete conversational commerce, including chatting with an intelligent digital assistant to find and buy products.

To bring its offerings to market, Addstructure raised $1.4m (£1.07m) in seed funding in February 2017 and is in a pilot project with one investor, Target, so that when a user opens the Target app and speaks the name of the product they want, the technology can find it. Addstructure is also exploring pilots with L’Oréal, Under Armour and 1stdibs.