Design and implementation of COSIMA-a smart and speaking e-sales assistant

Presents a new cooperative user interface for e-shopping in B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce. COSIMA (COmparison Shopping with Interactive Meta-search Agents) is a smart and animated Internet avatar with synchronized dynamic voice output who assists customers through their e-shopping tours and advises them in the spirit of a real salesperson in the old economy. COSIMA benefits from a Preference SQL-based search engine that relies on on the Pareto principle, computing best-matching results to the customer's wishes. This enables COSIMA to offer ideal hits or suitable alternatives with a single query, to evaluate these search results in terms of the stated preferences and to generate proper voice output, following the basic principles of sales psychology. As a sample application, we present a meta-search engine for comparison shopping. Since COSIMA constitutes an entire technological framework, it can easily be adjusted to other e-commerce environments by customizing the search engine, the avatar animations and the speech contexts.