Maluuba users can enter in all kinds of shopping-related requests and Maluuba will find a list of products it thinks matches your criteria. These can be both local and online products. Maluuba produces results from Google and has integrated into the data feeds of Best Buy and Walmart, allowing people to also see products from those retailers. It also provides local results for stores nearby.

For example, you can say: “Find me a humidifier under $50,” and Maluuba will bring back a list of a products that match. When I performed that search, Maluuba first took me to results from Google but I could check out tabs for Walmart and Best Buy. You can also ask for a specific brand or describe the product you’re looking for. When you’re ready to buy, you just click once and you go through an external check-out process.

The actual buying is still a little balky on a smartphone because you have to enter in payment and shipping data on a small screen. That’s why you see more smartphones in use for shopping research as opposed to actual buying, which happens more on PCs and tablets. But since starting a shopping query is pretty fast and intuitive with Maluuba, this might help spur on more smartphone-based commerce especially since the product isn’t limited to online shopping. Maluuba can also point you to retailers nearby that stock a product. That feature is based on Yelp data but it’s not always accurate.

Maluuba also provides a look into more than 100 etailer websites, including Amazon, eBay and others, so asking about a product from that retailer prompts Maluuba to send you into their website. For example, I was looking for sweaters at Zara and Maluuba took me right into the search results page for sweaters on Zara.com.

Maluuba, which has $2 million in funding from Samsung Ventures, is looking to integrate with thousands of commerce site and it also wants to incorporate social signals, said Tareq Ismail, Maluuba’s user experience designer. So in the future, Maluuba can customize searches and results based on a person’s interests and likes.

I think Maluuba needs more deep ecommerce integrations to be really useful, though it’s off to a good start. And it would be great if Maluuba could speed up the actual checkout process. I’d also like a simple way to continue reading my Maluuba results from another device so I can complete my purchases later. But I think it’s nice to have a way to craft shopping queries using natural language, especially when you’re on the go. And it might just get me to start more shopping quests from my phone.

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Maluuba, available on Android , allows the use of natural language commands to ask questions and create tasks without having to phrase those orders in a special way. Maluuba doesn’t respond with its own voice, but it makes up for that by connecting to 18 different services for answers and actions. Users can ask general web queries, set up calendar appointments, post to Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare, get info on local movies, restaurants or businesses and get directions.

The secret to Maluuba is that it relies on some very sophisticated natural language processing that uses a statistical base model, which is helpful in handling a number of different sectors. Maluuba then connects to a broad number of services through their APIs, allowing the app to not just produce search results but complete actions on behalf of the user. Google Calendar, Rotten Tomatoes, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Weather Underground and Wikipedia are some of the APIs that Maluuba can access.

This approach, said co-founder Sam Pasupalak, allows Maluuba to expand to more domains faster than Siri and connects it to services like Facebook that Google might avoid for competitive reasons.

“Apple’s goal is to create the user experience on their phone but we want to connect to as many APIs as possible,” said Pasupalak. “In the future, the web won’t be a mash of links but APIs.”

Maluuba officially launched last week and is now rolling out a minor update Thursday that features a widget so users can start queries from their home page. That’s great for getting into the service faster without having to fire up the app.

Maluuba began as a project between three University of Waterloo students and in February it raised $2 million from Samsung Ventures. The company is now trying to expand to more topics to take on more actions for users. And it’s planning its own SDK to welcome other developers who want to integrate with Maluuba.

The market is full of Siri wannabes trying to one-up Apple. But Maluuba shows a lot of promise in the time I’ve played with it. It’s got a very clean experience and can handle a whole lot of actions. And Maluuba should only get smarter as it plugs in more APIs. It doesn’t have the Slick presentation of Siri or Google Now’s ability to anticipate what information you’ll need ahead of time. But it’s a solid personal assistant that can give both the services a little run for their money.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management