Using AI techniques to support advanced interaction capabilities in a virtual assistant for e-commerce

Abstract This paper presents our work in the ADVICE (IST-1999-11305, Information Societies Technology Programme, V Framework Programme of the European Commission) project, an on-going European Commission research project of the IST Programme. The overall objective of this project is to design and implement an advice-giving system for E-commerce, supporting a move from the current catalogue-based customer services to a customer adapted intelligent assistance, emulating in some way the performance of a human seller. With this aim, the main elements of the ADVICE approach include an agent-based architecture with an Interface Agent to manage the multimedia presentation, the Interaction Agent to support an advanced user–system interaction and the Intelligent Agent incorporating a knowledge-based model of the e-business for the pilot domain, that supports the reasoning for advise-giving according with the user needs and the dialogue evolution.