Face-to-face interaction with an electronic personal sales assistant

The research presented explores a new paradigm for e-commerce human-computer-interaction, presentation and personalisation. It describes face-to-face conversational interaction with intelligent, visual, lifelike electronic sales assistant agents. This paradigm joins two research areas: that of visual and conversational interface agents which provide an intuitive metaphor for human-computer interaction based on face-to-face conversation; and that of knowledge-based, market-aware, user-aware personal agents that can adapt to individual consumer preferences and requirements in a service-based electronic market. By combining these two areas we yield a conversational form of human-machine interaction that has potential for shaping tomorrow's interface to the world of e-commerce.