How it works
The platform behind the pod.
If you've ever tried to keep product information consistent across your website, your retailer pages, your label and a compliance file, you'll recognise the problem TalkPod is built for. Your product data already lives somewhere, and you don't want to maintain it in a second place. So TalkPod doesn't ask you to. We read your data from where it already sits, check it against the regulations that apply to your category, and put your product in front of a customer or an auditor in whatever form they're asking for. The four stages on this page describe how that happens, and why it gets sharper the longer you run it.
The loop
A loop, not a pipeline.
Most product data tools run as one-way pipelines: source goes in, surface comes out, and nothing ever flows back. TalkPod doesn't. Every question a customer asks the pod is a signal about what your catalogue should say next, and that signal feeds back into the source.
Your product data stays where it is.
Most of the product information we connect to lives in a PIM, an ecommerce platform, or a working spreadsheet, often across all three. TalkPod reads from those systems directly. Nothing migrates and nothing has to be re-keyed, so the team that owns the data on your side carries on owning it. When you update a product spec on a Monday, the pod answering a customer on the Tuesday is already working from the new copy.
- Connects to
- PIM systems, ecommerce platforms, product feeds, CSV uploads, or a per-tenant API.
- Stays in sync
- When the source changes, the pod and the passport see it.
You'll know what's missing before an audit does.
Every product TalkPod reads is checked against the Digital Product Passport schema for its category. Textiles for textile products. Machinery for power tools. More categories as the EU publishes them. Each record gets a clear completeness score and a list of the fields that still need to be filled. By the time the 2027 deadline arrives, you've had time to do the work with intent, rather than under pressure.
- Schemas live
- Textiles, under the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. Machinery, under the Machinery Regulation.
- Per product
- Completeness score, the list of missing required fields, and a full field-level change history.
Your customer sees one half. Your compliance team sees the other.
A buyer on your site asks what frost rating the pressure washer is built for. The pod answers from your own product data in a couple of seconds. The same product also has a public passport at a stable URL: scan the QR on the box and the customer, the auditor or the retailer lands on the schema-validated record. Both surfaces come from one place, so a Tuesday update changes what your customer hears and what your auditor can verify at the same moment.
- Customer side
- Embeddable pod widget on any product page, multi-turn and multi-language. Willing to say it doesn't know rather than fabricate.
- Compliance side
- Public passport at /passport/<gtin>, also resolvable under the GS1 Digital Link convention at /01/<gtin>.
- More channels
- WhatsApp today. Voice and in-store kiosk on the roadmap, on the same data layer.
Every question your customer asks is data you didn't have.
Customers ask questions in patterns. Five buyers a week want to know whether something is dishwasher safe. Another twelve want to know if it ships to Northern Ireland. The pod logs each one, and where the data isn't quite there to answer well, that points at a real gap in the catalogue rather than a problem with the model. Brand teams see the questions, the answers and the gaps in the dashboard, and pilot tenants get a weekly buyer-question audit on top so the picture stays honest week to week.
- Per pilot
- Weekly buyer-question audit against the live pod, scored against what a real customer would expect to find.
- Per catalogue
- Field-level change history. Every passport edit is attributable, dated, and reversible.
Why the loop matters
The work you do today shows up in the catalogue tomorrow.
TalkPod isn't a chatbot we've bolted onto your website, and it isn't a passport portal that needs its own data maintained alongside everything else. It's a platform built around one record, and the longer it runs, the sharper that record gets. If you've got a catalogue and a deadline, we'd like to hear about it.