Intelligent Conversational Agent for Online Sales

A conversational agent is one of emerging technologies that will take place in several of life domains, including e-commerce. The common features of any conversational agent in any domain is its ability to have a dialog with a human user and 24/7 available. Thus, including a conversational agent in an online business will give benefits not only to online retailers, but also e-customers. However, a conversational agent for online sales may have a different feature than a conversational agent in other domain such as health care. The main task of a conversational agent in an online sales domain is to engage and persuade e-commerce customers to buy a product. In a real life, persuasion is considered as an abstract process, which only can be achieved through a series of dialogs. In a virtual world, a conversational agent for online sales is considered intelligent if it is able to demonstrate this feature. The aim of this paper is to propose a method to demonstrate persuasion feature through recommendation and negotiation dialogs to meet e-customers' needs. A prototype of the proposed system has been implemented and preliminary results indicate the proposed method is successful.