A shopping assistant agent for Web-shops

One of the most important problems of online shops on the World Wide Web is that a site visitor finds it difficult to choose an item to buy unless he or she has sufficient knowledge of that item. In this paper, the authors describe an intelligent software agent that works as a shopping assistant. The agent has knowledge about the merchandise and helps visitors to the shop choose items. The interaction with this agent has three features: (1) two interaction channels (selection and conversation); (2) flexible topic change (the user can trigger a new conversation flow even in the middle of a conversation); and (3) personalized interaction (the interaction is personalized according to user behavior). This agent has been applied to our Web site to help potential buyers of built-to-order (BTO) PCs. Implementation details and user behavior on the above site are described.